Home use - private use

Hi Carsten and thank you for your post!

Glad to hear that you are satistfied with M-Files product. We keep developing the system and one of our key strengths is that our pricing model really makes professional ECM finally affordable to SME's as well.

We do hear some feedback from customers willing to use M-Files for their personal document management will definitely keep this in mind when developing new versions and editions of the software and when considering license pricing.

Although, we do not have an official "Home" edition of M-Files available we have delivered our customers license codes for personal and educational use. Please contact our sales at sales@m-files.com for pricing details. Please include your company's license serial number to your inquiry if you are our customer already. Let us also know your country.

Mika Javanainen
Director, Product Management
M-Files Corporation

I think that M-Files is a wonderful system, it fulfills all need for a document management system. And frankly speaking, it is priced low when you look at the features you get... well, at least for business use.
But for home use it simply is too expensive, and I ask you to again consider a home use version or home use price. Look at other office products that are available in a lower priced version with restrictions on commercial use. You could put restrictions on support - limit support to this forum - or paid support only. There are lots of possibilities.
The request is more important now, that the express version is retired. I don't ask for having the free edition back, just a more reasonably priced version for home use. An idea could be a price in the area of 25% of business use price? I am sure you would gain a lot of customers that now are stuck with less professional products.

While I also lament the high price of M-Files for home use, I don't share your optimism that the Professional version would capture much market share for home use even at $50. The biggest problem with marketing M-Files for home use is not the price but the requirement for some minimum level of understanding of database theory and practice to be used successfully. As a database practitioner, that wasn't a problem for me, so I ended up buying a license this week. I would not be surprised if the acceptance of the free version was so small that a paid home version did not look very promising to the execs. Actually, the 10K limit would have been too small for us. We have about 16 packed file drawers we wish to convert to digital. Just for starters. I don't think 10K would cut it. But, I would be happy to live without all the complicated fine-tuned access security, things like "assignments" and such.

I do believe a killer consumer-level "appliance" package could be built around an M-Files core, that might be priced optimally (defined as maximizing total return) at around $199. A price below that would be unlikely to produce enough additional sales to increase total revenue. Such a product would have to be the type of thing that one simply installs and starts using. In other words, have almost everything that a typical home user might encounter already defined in the database.

Then, of course there would need to be mass marketing to get the word out. I can understand the slowness of the M-Files executives in considering such a product. It is not easy for a company with a business clientele to even think about becoming a mass-market company. Totally different things.

BTW: have a look at this: document-management-software-review.toptenreviews.com/m-files-review.html and look into the summary.

I originally found M-Files through that review. In fact, I tried almost every product reviewed so have my own slant on it. I found the ultimate winner in the article to be so bizarre it was almost hysterically funny. The product chosen as the "best document management software" is the only one in the competition that has practically zero "document management". No database at all, just full text searching of PDFs, and all "documents" must be PDFs. It took me about one hour to decide to discard that one.