Are you paying too much for bakery management software?
Some ERP-type software systems for bakeries may look low-cost, but, in reality, the charges for using them soon stack up.
When bakers find this to be the case, they often look for an alternative option and contact us. While their original choice of software may suit some small operators, being charged for every transaction, or for every user, can be expensive for bigger bakeries.
Take the example of software that is priced per transaction. According to one of our competitor’s website, the price of its software starts at around $250 a month. It charges per transaction, i.e. for each invoice or delivery note.
This means that if a wholesale bakery were to generate, say, 2000 invoices or delivery notes per month, the price would appear to work out closer to $800.
That’s a big difference. And, even at that price (by my calculations, at least) a bakery would be limited to around 66 delivery notes or invoices a day before it was charged even more.
In today’s cloud era, the per transaction model is perfectly suitable for other digital products. But, as many of the bakeries that use Cybake generate a far larger volume of transactions than this, I remain unconvinced that a metred billing model is appropriate to the baking sector.
Pricing per user
Pricing software per user is another kettle of fish. Also known as per seat pricing, this practice comes from the days before cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) became the norm. It is a holdover from the days when software vendors sold licences to run their applications on their customers’ own hardware.
For instance, per user pricing is used by another of our competitors, with prices starting at $295 per month. Should a bakery wish to add a new user to its system, however, it is charged an additional $145 per month. Once again, costs for a growing company can rise steeply.
In contrast, bakeries that use Cybake can add logins for new users, delete log ins for staff who have left, and restrict who sees what on their system, whenever they want for no extra charge. Control over who uses our software is left to our customers, who pay us a simple monthly subscription.
With Cybake, our customers know the cost of their subscription. With clear and consistent pricing, there are no nasty surprises at the end of each month. They are only charged for the functionality they need. And for bakeries that switch out old, on-premises applications for our cloud-based system, there are no longer any server hardware costs either.
Whether they run retail stores or wholesale operations (or both), our aim is to support our customers’ growth, not to take advantage of it.
If you are dealing with costly and complex bills for the software you use to run your bakery, why not get in touch?
Rachel Hindle is the Global Sales & Marketing Manager of Cybake.
