Ok, first off let me preface this by saying I certainly understand that all businesses incur costs, and your business model has always puzzled me and how you stayed free. None the less its been fantastic, but this latest move leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

First of all the email you sent earlier reeked of disrespect and almost desperation. I have and I know many others who have moved to your proposal systems almost exclusively. I understand you built the system on the grounds of making money on the distributor side. However there are some major vendors that do not accept your PO's (Control4 for one) is a huge drawback and why I don't use your system for POs. I also do not like the fact that there is no choice in billing options for selected vendors. It just uses the default credit card on file. Personally I rotate credit cards for maximum points but I imagine quite a few guys rotate cards due to delays in customer invoices, high credit etc. etc.

You have no other options for making money? The blatantly obvious one is sending invoice, credit card options to vendors etc (you guys would obviously make a cut on the processing) there are many ways I see you guys could make money that im sure many of us would be happy to oblige. But here is what really frustrated me about your email. You have the option of sending only 4 proposals a month without incurring a fee, meh, not great but better then none. Or then consistently order through the system....see above for reasons. what really rubbed me the wrong way is order 5k worth of product to get it free. This is where this strikes me as being painfully out of touch.

Most of us are small businesses. We have peaks and valleys year round, and in some months may not even invoice 5k a month. There are some people in markets that use your system that barely do 50-100k PER YEAR in revenue. Which means hitting that target is nearly impossible.

Now onto the pricing, again, I understand you guys have a large overhead and you need to make money, but $50 a month? COME ON! that is absurd. it does not take a rocket scientist to do the math, $600 a year? Nope. We can go to d-tools and cut a deal at Cedia that would make our break even around 1.3 years. I Know there would be some manual labor involved in keeping up with the prices but you get what im saying. (their maintenance fee is also lower if you chose to have access to their catalog) most of us have our catalogs and invested the time in getting it set up.

this is what I feel happened. You guys pushed an update that doesn't work (still doesn't work) You had cost over runs and need to recoup some of those costs. you knew a lot of dealers had exclusively moved to the system and now you feel were so deep we'll just pay. I haven't opened up d-tools in over a year but the second I have to pay for your new buggy website is the second I and many others open up our D-Tools. I would STRONGLY suggest rethinking this strategy. I don't mean to sound like an entitled prick but that email really rubbed me the wrong way.

I would love to still support you guys but I think the time spent redoing the website should have been used to develop an invoicing system or other ways to make revenue. Your new website has serious issues, it still was NOT ready to be released.