Monday 15 October 2018

WinAutomation The Once Fantastic RPA - Now a Money Hungry Monster

I've resorted to writing this post out of bitter disappointment at the path the Softmotive WinAutomation team have chosen to follow.

In their early days they were a FANTASTIC company to work with.
Their support team were friendly, helpful and easily accessible.

Their pricing model was affordable and their exe creation and distribution was simple and easy to manage for both small and large organisations alike.

Although even then they did not support per-user licensing of the IDE, as a single user it was easy to switch between multiple machines by de-registering on one and re-registering on another.

I was a huge fan and promoted the use of the product to a fair number of companies.

Well, sad-to-say now all that has gone amidst their greedy drive for making as much money as possible from large companies stupid enough to spend their money in this manner.
The "little guys" have been left lying in the dirt.

Their pricing model is now hard to find and in some cases requires registration to fully access all details.

Their Support forum is now locked away from general users and for those registered users who have full access, it's still nowhere near as user-friendly as it used to be.

The original pricing of US$425 per developer IDE has risen to a minimum of US$999 (AU$1,410)

Now a single IDE license is rigidly fixed to a single machine so a single developer can no longer easily move between machines.

While totally free distribution of compiled exe's was truly fabulous, it has to be recognised that was never a viable model financially.
That said, to now turn round and charge the ridiculous price of US$399 for every machine that you want to run a single compiled exe on is just utterly ridiculous!
Lets do the math ... 14,000 corporate nodes x US$399 = $5,586,000 plus current US-AU exchange is a mere AU$7,888,549 ... even with MASSIVE corporate discounts that's still not even in the realms of sanity!

Sorry to say, I join with a growing number of other former users who have said the likes of ...
"WOW! I will search for an alternative to WinAutomation"



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