Tong Family

Well, all good things have to come to an end. MoveableType will now “cost”:http://secure.sixapart.com are essentially $150-$900 for the personal weblogs that I manage right now (this site, Geekfishing.net and the related sites).
The real issue here is whether they should charge or not, but they are making a classic “averaging” mistake. That is, getting $50/personal user would be a home run based on getting 100K users, but the price is way, way, too low for an enterprise where the department version should be about $500 and the enterprise in the $5,000 range. Most of the cost justification based on support. That would have been fairly typical. Ironically that averages to $200/customer, but that’s not the way you charge. Oh well.
Fortunately, there remain quite a few free services out there like LiveJournal and Blogger. With the improvements in Blogger, we’ll look that way for a migration strategy. Good thing MovableType is popular enough that there are easy ways to suck things out of it.
Personally, I would have moved to a more generous strategy on the free version, added a charge for technical support but at all costs kept the momentum up. The point longer term is to get 1M blogs on MovableType IMHO.