Inforiver Matrix: Feb 2024 - Bye Bye Developer-Only Subscription Plans

Summary: We are retiring the developer-only subscription plan for Inforiver Matrix. If you are an existing customer, this will not impact you as your plan will be grandfathered.

Three months ago, we released a note outlining why we launched developer-based subscription plans (that support unlimited viewers), and why we may discontinue these plans a few months into the future. That time has come now.

Effective immediately, we are suspending developer-based subscription plans from AppSource for the reasons outlined below.

1. We are experiencing a huge and disproportional support burden in enterprises with larger deployments, typically with a handful of developers but a huge volume of report viewers/consumers. To help us serve the large enterprises better, the pricing needs to reflect the size of the enterprise and the Power BI user base – which was not the case in several implementations.
2. Large enterprises also have not embraced Microsoft Licensing API as we expected – as the AppSource lacked support for offline methods involving Quote/ Invoice/ Purchase Orders – something that is heavily preferred by large enterprises.
3. Many large enterprises also place add-on software orders through resellers (Insight, SHI, Software One, et.al) resulting in heavy operational burden without license management – something that we did not anticipate.
4. After Microsoft Power BI’s new feature of OneDrive PBIX sharing, many enterprises used the developer-only license as a publisher license. In effect, many are using the free desktop to develop reports, and have designated Inforiver developer for publishing these reports using developer-only licenses.
5. Developer-only pricing was mis-priced and very low to begin with compared to the value offered/generated for enterprises.
6. We have been the only vendor to offer developer-only subscription in the marketplace.
7. Finally, the developer-only plans had only passive reading view with no interactive capabilities which goes against our vision of empowering casual users to dynamically interact with our full-featured toolbar driven capabilities.

For customers not opting for AppSource purchasing – you can leverage the (legacy) license-key based approach (which avoids license assignment for viewers with internal good-faith based honor system for report viewer estimates).

It will be reflected in the next 2 – 3 weeks in Microsoft AppSource. If you purchase any subscription before this change takes effect, your plan will be honored.