topic Re: Free Tier Going Away in ExtremeCloud IQ

Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 20:09:11 GMT

We are a non-profit and have been on the free tier going on 9 years. It's been a great run and trying to figure out next steps as we are being told the "only" option is to pay the $100 fee per device per year. At over 100 devices, this is just not good to pull that much from a non-profit YoY on something we hardly ever log into and do not need any of the advanced features on.

I thought Extreme was better than that, and I have sold so many of these to other churches that it's now embarrassing to go back to them to tell them. I was told that it was due to the free tier hosting costs Extreme so many $'s, but they are still providing a "free" tier for 10 devices. So, that reason and going all the way to $100 per device doesn't make any sense. Maybe $20 a device, but not $100. If anything, give your non-profits more options as this is killing us

A few questions

1) how soon did you know about this? We only found out last week when we logged in, but our sales rep says we should have received an email. unfortunately, we did not... 😞

2) Is anyone managing all their devices using an SSH config tool? I used Kiwi CatTools years ago, but thinking something else like Auvik could be a better choice based on what it will give.

3) is anyone moving to another product? We were on the cuff of purchasing $15-20k of additional extreme gear, but wondering if that will be better spent on another product. Would love to know what you are considering as a few other churches I have spoken with are using a variety from unifi, aruba, Fortinet, and Ruckus. Not super excited about Unifi beyond the price, and I know many of the larger venue churches mostly use Ruckus.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

JonasD_Complit — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 12:24:06 GMT

Yeah it really sucks and very weird decission. If you buy for multiple years you will receive more discount. But indeed it will cost a lot of money for non-profit.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

SamPirok — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:08:24 GMT

Hey all, just wanted to clarify here real quick- To my knowledge connect isn't going away, but will be limited to 10 devices per Connect instance going forward. No limit to how many Connect instances you have, and it will still be an option available for those who don't want to pay for the more advanced features in the licensed version of XIQ. Hope that helps.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:00:33 GMT

Thanks @SamPirok for the reply.

I have asked sales to get creative as I don't need the features and don't mind paying a fee, but not $100 a year per device. I have actually looked back into using Kiwi or something like it to do all SSH management, but honestly, the amount of commands that it takes on these devices is pretty crazy compared to 9 years ago. I think back then it was somewhere around 150 lines and now we are over 500 on the WAPs. the switches are even more than that, with 16-33 lines per port.

CLI is not impossible, but it me wonder how easy it would be to miss essential commands.

You said that there is not a limit to the number of free instances. which brings an interesting concept of having 11 or so instances for our setup. I think i can carve it up per ministry to make sense on our end, but wondering what steps I need to take to ensure wireless handoff between access points still works good.

Do you know about this and what else I need to consider when splitting between instances?

Re: Free Tier Going Away

SamPirok — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 13:00:39 GMT

You'd want to keep all APs in a building in the same instance if at all possible. If a client has to roam between APs that are in different Connect instances, even if the SSID is the same and saved in the device so it's an automatic connection, there would be a brief disconnection for that device while it connects to the AP in a different Connect instance.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 21:36:27 GMT

Will that disconnect hold true even if I configured the hive profile the same on each?

Also, I realized that a complete code view in Connect IQ gives you completely different results than when you ssh into the AP. It's a lot closer to manageable in ssh.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:55:06 GMT

I spun some ideas to national America sales, but beyond multi-year discounts, there hasn't been any traction. SSH is still an option and can spin up a linux for something like pssh to gain full access to all features while pushing out parallel ssh commands. or... just go down the route of multiple free instances, which @SamPirok is saying handoff between APs can be an issue. However, I have an inquiry into him if that still hold true if the hives are configured the same between free instances..

The one thing I think might happen is the free instance gets shut down completely if multiple people take the multiple instance route, as their "cost" problem on the free instance will get a lot worse as I personally see quite a few people taking that route as SSH is old school and not necessarily a web access technology.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

kkurniawan — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:50:11 GMT

How the system knows that we have reached limit of 10 devices? If I have 50 devices that sitting behind same PUBLIC IP network and I create 5 different user accounts to manage, will that work? All 50 devices will be on the same public ip network. OR will the system count based on the number of devices registered under each user account?

Re: Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:15:58 GMT

From my understanding, it is how many are registered. So, if you don't take the path of spinning up 5 free instances (to stay under the 10) or use CLI, then it takes you from $0 a year to around $5,000 for those same 50 devices. As for the cost, when you look at the competition, I don't blame them for wanting to increase revenue, but this should have been thought out better as this is one of the cost-of-ownership attractions with Extreme. I'm sure there is a happy medium in this, but they will gain some dollars at the cost of losing a percentage of clients to other platforms.

Re: Free Tier Going Away

bswaby — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:25:34 GMT

FYI: I received confirmation that this will be effective on Jan 1, 2024.