TeamSpeak 6 optional client license proposal

[Onakander]

I’d like to propose an additional optional feature to the licensing model.

A pre-amble follows:

This may be a bit premature, as the licensing terms for TS6 self-hosting have not been made public as of yet. Please bear with me as I still think no matter what pricepoint you settle the self-hosting licenses at, this will be a reasonable addition to the pricing model. (As long as the TeamSpeak team keeps being reasonable about it and aren’t going to keep this current community server fee magnitude. Especially in relationship to how much storage one would get for the server per unit of money invested, it is untenable in my opinion. In any case, this aside is slightly off-topic already. Also in order to do some pre-emptive counter-argument-swatting, I realize the current cost includes space on and maintenance of a server, and it is fine for what it is, we DO need a “one-click” solution as well for those of use who do not have the technical ability/patience/willingness/reason to host their own servers. Having an official server-hosting platform is undoubtably a good thing.)

However, I do not like that in order to self-host a server as it stands with the current legacy TS3 licensing model, one would be either expected to “eat” the fees incurred by (part of) your friend-group, or start gathering funds from each friend every year. This, realistically, is not going to happen. I don’t want to bug my friends for a dollar every year, but I also do not want to pay 5 dollars a month for the privilege of doing server maintenance and such for my friend-group.

With this proposal, one person in the group could easily put a TS6 server on some unused VPS space (a LOT of people who could/would self-host TS6 servers have VPS instances, and I’d argue EVERYONE should, just from an “if you have one, you have none” -backup standpoint, as in, one should back up all of one’s important files off-site) and have a pathway for TeamSpeak to automatically do it for them WITHOUT incurring any appreciable losses for TeamSpeak as a company. In fact, I’d argue it’d end up a net-positive for TeamSpeak’s cashflow.

End pre-amble. The meat of the post follows:

Essentially, I would like there to be an option to buy a CLIENT license for TeamSpeak 6. It would function as follows:

Essentially, whatever the license is per slot per year, would be paid monthly (likely in yearly or even longer increments) by anyone wishing to buy the TS6 client license. So if, let’s say, your license costs are 1 dollar per slot per year. (so a 64 slot server would cost 64 dollars per year), the person subscribing to the client license, would pay 12 dollars, and have one year of access to the client license.

This client license would allow the client to bypass the slot limit on the server license, and incur a license discount for the server host. (with server-owner permission, handled semi-automatically via settable limits in the config, to avoid overstraining server infrastructure not made for it)

A TS6-client-subscriber would have 12 servers they can “boost”, boosts could only be reallocated once every several months (maybe even yearly) to avoid abuse in the form of “server juggling”. Any server “boosted” by a client-license-holder, would get a rebate of one slot on their pricing in their next bill AND the server would essentially gain an extra slot.

In essence, should the server have an example slot-count of 16 slots, and I, a user with a client license join the server and select it as one of my “boosted” servers, the server’s total capacity becomes 17 users, with me included, and assuming nobody else boosts the server, the server owner’s next yearly bill will come down to 15 dollars ((16-1) slots * 1 dollars/slot/year == 15 dollars/year) TeamSpeak will still receive the same total amount of licensing income, and I did not need to make a financial contract with my friends to transfer that piddly dollar a year to them. Hosting costs can be written off, because, again, most people who WOULD self-host a server for their friend-group, almost certainly have some VPS-space unused, or at least knows someone who does.

This would also enable a new category of self-hosted server: the slotless server, where only client-subscribers can connect, should they be willing to assign a boost to the server. This could be the default “Your free trial has run out and you haven’t bought a license” -mode of operation for a TS6 server.

It also does not stop someone from buying a small license, so that they can still “eat” the costs of having their “grandma” on the server, (or what have you person who cannot/will not pay for the client license, but you’d still dearly want to include in your community.)

This sort of devalues the server slots by up to half, on an absolute scale, if you want to think of it like that… But this can be solved in two ways:

1. My favorite way: Do not deal with it. Use the “extra” as incentive for server administrators to shill for client-licenses. Not everyone will use all their slots, especially if you institute a minimum client-slot-count (which would make sense, since transaction fees on whatever 1 dollar a year-level payments would become quite absurd) leading to an excess of income for every user who does not use all their boosts. 12 dollars a year would be quite a reasonable price for a communication software suite that allows one to not be spied upon by a megacorporation and have freedom over how much (if any) space is allocated to the pictures/documents/videos they want to share and so on and so forth.
2. Raise the “per slot price” for the client licensee to twice the yearly server host license per slot price. (or lower the number of boosts available per dollar, the math works out the same) This keeps the “absolute price per usable slot” constant, no matter what… But I don’t like this approach, because of (perceived or real) unfairness in this pricing structure. As in: “Why shouldn’t my buddy just buy the slots and I’ll give them the money directly? Bah. Stupid. What’s the point?”

In conclusion, thank you to those who read this, I’m going to do the (ir)responsible thing and go to bed and come back to this in the morning.

Also: Apologies in advance if I’ve broken some kind of rule in posting this or if I’ve posted it in the wrong sub-forum, I looked through the rules and there didn’t SEEM to be anything against discussing potential licensing structure changes.

[SYOX]

Hey there, thanks for the detailed proposal and no worries, you didn’t break any rules. Licensing ideas and feedback are welcome here in the forum, especially with this much thought behind them.

Quick disclaimer first: as you’ve mentioned yourself, the licensing model for TS6 self-hosting hasn’t been announced yet, and nothing below confirms or denies any of our plans.

Here is what I understood, and if I’m wrong, please feel free to correct me: you’re proposing an optional client-side subscription (or license?) that sits on top of the normal server licensing. A subscriber gets 12 boosts, a boosted server gains one slot, and the host’s next bill drops by one slot’s worth. Server licenses themselves stay exactly as they are.

The problem is that one person in the group/community quietly ends up paying for everyone, either by self-hosting with a paid license or by renting a server via an ATHP, and collecting a dollar per friend per year doesn’t happen in practice that often and is kind of weird to do.

Where your proposal/model loses me is the rebate. To be fair, payment problems can already take a server down today, an unpaid license or an unpaid VPS bill has a similar effect. The difference is that today there is exactly one person responsible per server, and that person gets the payment reminders, notices the problem and can fix it on the spot. With these proposed boosts, capacity depends on the payment status of every boosting member. One expired credit card among ten boosters and the server quietly loses a slot, and someone bounces off a full server. Of course, the visibility part could be solved with some sort of boost overview for the server, tied to the permission system, so the admin or anyone with the right permissions can see which boosts are active and which one lapsed (or are about to expire). But even then, I think seeing the problem isn’t the same as fixing it. The admin still can’t touch someone else’s payment method, so the only person who can actually resolve it is the member whose card expired, and that person is usually the last one to notice. That’s a lot of support pain designed in on purpose.

The math is the other thing. The subscription money does come in, but with your option 1 pricing the rebate sends the same amount straight back out: a subscriber who assigns all 12 boosts pays 12 dollars and removes 12 dollars from server bills. Our income stays exactly where it was, we just handed out 12 extra slots plus a lot of billing complexity around them. The model only earns something on boosts that people pay for but never assign, and that seems like a shaky base for a licensing model. Your option 2 pricing would fix our side of that math, but you already wrote down yourself why buyers would find it pointless, and honestly the same applies here: someone with a single friend group pays 12 dollars to avoid a 1 dollar conversation.

On the “client license” part: you could fairly point out that server licensing already costs money, so this wouldn’t suddenly make TeamSpeak “paid” in that sense. Agreed. The difference to me is where the price sits. Today one admin handles the license and everyone else just connects, no individual user ever deals with a price or has to even think about that (unless they have/had to pay for the TS3 Mobile App). A client-side subscription changes that deal for the first time, even as an optional add-on. And the people currently comparing us to Discord and/or other alternatives are exactly the ones who react the most to a price tag on the client/product, no matter how optional it actually is. And yes, explaining that properly would be our job, both on the implementation/design side and in marketing the feature, but if the same problem can be solved without creating the explanation problem in the first place, I’d personally take that route.

The slotless mode is the one part that I don’t agree with. A server nobody can join without a personal subscription flips the whole thing from “someone pays for the server” to “everyone pays to connect”, and that’s simply not what TeamSpeak is about in my view. If a paid option on the client side ever exists, it should unlock extras, not access. That’s also why Nitro never really backfired on Discord: it only gates perks, and nobody has ever been unable to join a server because they didn’t have it.

Where I think you’re onto something is the pain point underneath. To me it reads as a payment question more than a licensing question. Letting members chip in on a server’s license directly would remove the awkward money conversation without touching the client at all.

Either way, I’ll pass this along to the team, including the pricing feedback from your preamble. Can’t promise any outcome from your proposal, but a post argued this well is easy to share with the team :D

And again, if I misunderstood anything, please feel free to correct me.

Thanks for taking the time, we really appreciate it! :)