Free Tier Going Away

[bswaby]

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.   

[James_A]

Surely another option would be to have a cheaper paid license at the Connect tier that lets you go above 10 devices per instance?

[bswaby]

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.

[bswaby]

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?

[SamPirok]

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. 

[bswaby]

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.