Today we announced the completion of our acquisition of the Kerio Personal Firewall and the Kerio Server Firewall. Link to our corporate propaganda here.
Here are the key points:
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Existing customers of the paid versions will receive full technical support through
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We are also maintaining Kerio’s product support forums for both products, with full transition of the forums to
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We are continuing Kerio’s tradition of offering a free home version.
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We will be launching a new version of the Kerio Server Firewall in the first quarter of next year, at a competitive price point.
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We are dropping the price on both products. And, we’re giving 25% off on the Kerio Personal Firewall product through the end of March.
Personal Firewall will get Sunbelt’s “no brainer” pricing.
We’ve had this idea for years of what we call “No Brainer” pricing. The idea is that it’s such a value that it makes the whole purchasing decision easy. Plus, I do feel that most software is overpriced anyway.
Well, $19.95 is no-brainer pricing. It’s the cost of a decent meal. So we have priced the Kerio Personal Firewall at Sunbelt’s No Brainer pricing of $19.95. With that, you get one year of free support, upgrades and updates. Subsequent annual subscriptions are currently $10. It’s a ridiculously good deal.
This type of pricing upsets my accountants and the competition, but it’s good for the user and ultimately, it’s good for the company as it allows us to develop a large user base..
But I went a step further. I want as many people that are using the free version to convert to the paid version. I also want our own users to own the product. And in order to get people to buy, you need two things: a) a hot price and b) time urgency. So I instructed our online shop team to put in place a 25% discount on the Kerio Personal Firewall until March 31. That makes it $14.95. It’s ridiculously cheap and I expect a lot of people will be buying up this firewall.
This $14.95 pricing works for people renewing their license purchased through Kerio as well.
Kerio had previously shipped a server version of their firewall, but it was expensive and was ultimately discontinued. We are working on a new version 2.0, which adds a lot amount of functionality to the previous version, including remote management of multiple servers and plenty of other features. We’ll have it ready to ship the first quarter. We’re still trying to figure out a good price for this thing, but I can assure you, it will be less expensive than the version Kerio had sold.
The whole 2.1.5 issue
Years ago, Kerio shipped a version that was an extremely simple and powerful packet filter tool. Ultimately, development was ended at version 2.1.5, and the new version 4 (there never was a version 3) was shipped. Version 4 is a superset of the old version 2.
There’s a lot of loyal users of the old 2.1.5 version who haven’t upgraded to version 4. Many want us to re-release it. I’ve looked at this older version, and I can truly understand its charm: It’s a tight, small and very elegant tool for the highly technical user.
Internally, we discussed at length the possibility of re-releasing version 2.1.5. However, ultimately our development team came back with the news that this was not going to be possible without a Herculean effort. This is tired code. Even doing a build is nearly impossible and presents enormous headaches from a development standpoint.
However, I do agree with the loyal users about all that this old version had to offer and we will see what we can do on future versions of the Kerio Personal Firewall accommodate your personal preferences.
For now, those who still want to run the old version 2.1.5 can download it here.
The future
We’re proud of this acquisition, but we’re also humbled by our responsibilities to such a large, active and loyal user base. We are committed to supporting Kerio users and you can always contact me personally if you ever have any issues. We’re big fans of these products and look forward to doing more great things with them.
Alex Eckelberry
President, Sunbelt Software