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Tiered Pricing for Desktop Document
Creation A report by PlanetDjVu, March 16,
2003 The San
Jose Mecury News reports this week at SiliconValley.com
that Adobe Systems is expected to announce new tiered pricing for
its next-generation of Acrobat products, related to how customers use
them. For
example, customers who want to create Acrobat PDF documents, add comments
and sign them would pay a higher price than customers who simply wanted to
create a PDF document. Three
pricing levels for PDF products are expected. Adobe, based in San Jose,
will make a more detailed announcement on pricing in early April (most
likely at the AIIM show in NYC). The product now retails for
$249. Among the
many features of the current Acrobat product are the ability to scan,
create multipage PDF files, OCR them and perform OCR cleanup. There is no
limit on the number of PDF files that can be created. The
original two-tier design from LizardTech was DjVu Solo Non-Commercial
Edition, which let you create single-page DjVu files with no OCR for free,
and DjVu Solo Commercial Edition, which let you create multi-page DjVu
files with OCR. The Commercial Edition retailed for $299. LizardTech
announced a new two-tier product design, but not pricing, last June when
it renamed DjVu Solo Commercial Edition to "Document Express Desktop
Edition" and "Document Express Professional Edition". LizardTech
still does not publish retail prices, and seems to have all but abandoned
retail distribution, but we have gleaned what the prices are from the GSA
Schedule. See our earler
News item on this subject. Document
Express Desktop Edition restricts you to single page file creation, as did
the earlier DjVu Solo Non-Commercial Edition, but adds some new features
including a DjVu Print Driver. It also reportedly includes OCR capability.
We cannot confirm this, since our request to review this project at the
Planet was turned down, and our reseller status was cancelled. The price
for this product is about $249, the same as the current Acrobat 5
product. Document
Express Professional Edition adds support for multipage DjVu file
creation, but restricts you to creating only 10,000 DjVu pages. The price
for this product is about $995. After you have used up the 10,000 pages,
you can purchase another 10,000 pages for an additional $995, or you can
purchase "Page Cartridges" in larger quantities than this at a lower
per-page cost. The cost of a "DjVu page" is the same regardless of whether
it is bitonal or color (segmented), OCRed or not. We do not know if a page
created with the DjVu Print Driver counts as a "DjVu Page". The
specifications for these products are sketchy
at best at the LizardTech website. While
Adobe has no per-page pricing in the Acrobat product, they DO have
per-page pricing in the separate Acrobat Capture product. Acrobat
Capture 3.0, which has a retail price of $399, includes 20,000
"OCR Pages" (plus an undocumented 2,000 fudge pages, so you can't get
upset when you make a mistake, we might add). A page charge is not for
creating a PDF page, only for OCRing it. There is no charge for non-OCRed
pages, which are unlimited. Acrobat Capture, unlike Document Express
Provessional Edition, is a true batch processing application. Acrobat
Capture is best compared to "Document Express Enterprise Edition - GUI
Version", which sells for about $6,000 for 100,000 DjVu
pages. We applaud
the tiered pricing model for retail desktop document creation products, as
it lets customers just pay for the just the features and functions that
they need.
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