Milestone Launches Free Upgrade, Building Upon New Free Essential

I would not switch to Milestone based on this. They seem totally unstable and there is too high a risk that they will one day pull this offer and essentially blackmail all your customers into paying.

iHiji did the same thing a few years back with a "lifetime" free offering that suddenly became a mandatory paid offering with the minimum requirement being 10 systems. Absolutely would not deal with a company like Milestone who appears to be going in this direction. This is the down-side to internet connected / cloud based devices in general. Not saying that Milestone would reach into a DVR from the internet and disable it, but I'm not ruling that out either.

After the migration offer, agreed not the first three years, all existing Essential customers will be paying their CARE Plus a lot more than they did until now...

Also, every camera they add will cost them a lot more if they take the offer. A customer can buy an extra Essential camera license at 39,- € for now, after 01/01/2017 he'll have to pay 59,- €.

It seems to me they did the math, probably based on statistics on how many extra licenses an average Essential customer adds to his starting point in three years and calculated from there.

Something tells me it's not the customer who is going to get better from this migration deal in the long run

Do the math:

I have a customer with currently 2 Essentials and in total 10 camera licences. He wants to add 9 camera's.

If all would stay the same he'd had to pay 9 x 36,- cam license and 9 x 16,- 3 year CARE Plus = 495,- EURO. CARE Plus on his existing camera's is still active

Now with the 'deal'

He pays 10 x 12,- EURO for the migration = 120,- EURO

Then he adds 9 camera's, 9 x 59,- EURO + CARE Plus 9 x 24,- EURO = 747,- EURO + 120,- migration cost = 869,- EURO

Compared to 495,- EURO, who is winning here? And that's only for the first three years, this keeps getting worse year after year.

OK, he has more features but guess what, he doesn't need them. they just add up to the 80% of features he isn't allready using now.

So, will i push my customers into the migration deal? Not convinced yet to be honest

Milestone can't be getting people on board with the failed "care" offering so they are going subscription based. You cant buy the essential bases licenses now.

So a project with 30 sites quoted 20 days ago leaves us as the installer screwed as the costs for the free upgrade to express ISN'T CHEAPER. Its actually not free as you have to trade in. This is only a free upgrade if you have care which TBH who needs cares on essential! Whatever way you cook it if you quoted for essential you are done because you have to buy express which is more expensive.

Add another scenario you have a customer with 2015 essential, you want an extra camera to cover that break in last night - Nope! You have to almost throw the old license in the bin and start again to get 1 extra license!

So it goes against everything Milestone has ever sold as not having limits like a DVR, (i.e you buy a 8 channel dvr you throw away for camera 9 etc).

You cant get a camera license for their older software unless you have at all.. Which goes again their original license agreement.

Its so badly thought out, Milestone have become the closed platform company. Their communication is terrible, totally untrustworthy - had enough..