You really don’t have to justify yourself for not wanting to pay more than you should for anything, and that includes your FileMaker licenses. Below are some items that may indicate you pay too much for your software licenses.

1- You bought your licenses online.

Purchasing your licenses directly online may be convenient and fast, but you can be certain that you are paying the full retail price for your purchase. We sure hope you are not paying more than that price. Keep reading to see how you can pay less than the price you get online.

2- You bought almost as many licenses as you have employees on payroll.

The above is ok, only if your purchase is one for a site license. If not, you are overpaying quite a bit. As it turns out, site licensing is not available online directly. Contact us to see if you are eligible and how this could translate to savings for you.

3- You qualify for non-profit or educational pricing

This clearly does not apply to everyone, but if it does, it should be #1 on your list. This category can also encompass hospitals, libraries, research laboratories and museums, under certain conditions. Perhaps you qualify without even knowing about it! Make sure to check this web page to get clarifications about this. 

4- You purchased the “wrong” number of licenses.

Hear us out for a second. We are not suggesting that you do not know how many licenses you need to use FileMaker. The thing is, the pricing follows the volume of purchase, to a certain degree. There are clear pricing tiers, and if you are close to the upper end of a given tier, it can be cheaper to purchase more licenses in order to fall in the lower end of the next tier. We can quite literally say, there are some quantities of licenses that should never be ordered. Not all numbers are created equal, some are good, some are bad. It may not be very intuitive, but it is true.

5- You purchased from the partner with whom you already do business.

Your trusted Claris Partner is the best source to recommend the licensing that best fits your use case. Recommend. Let us stress that part for a minute. They know best what you need, and that is true. Does that mean they are going to give you the best price? The only way to tell, is to shop around. 

Your Claris Partner should quote you using the same SKUs Claris is using to process orders. If they don’t, perhaps they want to make comparison harder, who knows. The only thing we can say is that Claris Partners are not reselling licenses for free. Each of them also have different cost of operations, so some may have more wiggle room than others to offer you competitive pricing. 

At Accolade Plus Accolade, none of our customers pay the retail price for their FileMaker licenses. If you want to know how much you will pay when renewing your licenses with us, just get in touch.

Think of it as your own car. You can buy parts when your car is being serviced at the dealer, or you can get the same parts for a better price elsewhere. Your dealer will be using the exact same parts either way.

6- Your contract is only for the next 12 months

Claris is giving substantial discounts on years 2-5 of almost all licensing contracts. If you can afford to pay ahead of time, savings can add up to almost a full year of licensing. So if FileMaker is part of your business landscape and there to stay, consider going long on your licensing terms.

7- You have multiple users connecting to your server, but not at the same time.

This is a special case as it requires using either FileMaker WebDirect or FileMaker Go. So if you rely on FileMaker Pro to connect to your server, this is not for you. But if you rely on those other products of the Claris family and your users connect to your server for periods that do not overlap, you can purchase Concurrency Licenses. What’s that? You can think of it as parking spaces in a parking lot. Your server will accept as many connections as you have licenses, not caring who the underlying user is. User licenses and site licenses apply to named users. Not concurrency licenses. So if you have a business running 3 shifts for example, with 120 part-time employees, but where there are never more than 20 employees on a shift at the same time, you can purchase 20 concurrency licenses (20 parking spots) and run FileMaker with those licenses for all your employees.

Conclusion

There are many licensing options, and it is not always easy to determine what is best for your specific use case, at the best price. At Accolade Plus Accolade, we seek what is in your interest and want to be sure to give our customers the best for everything FileMaker related. Dealing with the right partner can make all the difference in the world. If any of this makes you want to chat with us, please reach out.