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Use Claris FileMaker to Build Business Applications — Claris
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Well done. I've used FM ever since it was a flat-file data base. This version works just like I've come to know and love. Very powerful much more powerful than I can ever understand let alone use but simple enough so that I can make it do what I want. Had a problem with item but customer support took care of within 24 hours.
MacDeals is a great seller and I recommend highly. A few new features but mostly an update to keep up with the latest Mac operating system upgrades.
Expect to be even more pleased when I I'm still learning how to make it do what I want it to. So far it's very good. Expect to be even more pleased when I learn it better. One person found this helpful. This item is either a Chinese version, or a counterfeit. Except for the front cover, the text on the box is in Chinese. I didn't attempt to install this on my computer I didn't even open it. I have submitted a request for a refund.
Very pleased to find this. Enabled me to update from vs 6. Im now compatible with win 10 Instal went vey well, works great. I expected this to be fully El Capitan compatible as FMPro11 although still working , was doing a few odd things, such as not displaying some fonts at all in Preview mode and showing a black window briefly on startup.
Oh well, at least I'll be able to pay an extortionate amount to upgrade to FMPro15 when it appears See all reviews. Top reviews from other countries. Translate all reviews to English. Report abuse Translate review to English. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations. Back to top. Get to Know Us. Make Money with Us. Amazon Payment Products. Let Us Help You. The ROI is 10x higher than the previously mentioned company. Site Licenses annual or perpetual offer the lowest cost per user.
Well priced? It's not the same for everyone, but for us and for me, the value greatly out-weighs the cost. While 1 of the companies was a bit suspect, the others were top level development companies hired by several top level companies with exceptional web and social media presence.
It's easy to say "FileMaker isn't for real because you have to pay for licenses", but for the overall project cost In my experience, no. Maybe yours is different. But the money comes out of their account either way. Just much less of it. It seems after a year of using the custom app, the value should be high enough, that the license cost is now just a cost of doing business. I'm a relative newbie to FMP. FMP has so much potential. FileMaker's strategy is a mystery to me.
On one hand FMP likes to court "citizen developers. The documentation and training are poor. There is simply no other way to put it. It's a minimum of hours to get past entry-level competency. The teams pricing is aimed at new users who are sure they are going to put in a pretty considerable effort. Use-limited free tiers are standard these days. Where is the free tier?
Compare something like Airtable. Yes, FMP is far more powerful, and Airtable has its problems e. What I mean is compare the website, the pricing, and the ease of getting up to speed. Compare the starter solutions. Compare the integrations. A citizen developer likely could learn the basics of Airtable faster than a citizen developer could understand the intricacies of the FMP pricing and hosting options. First tip: if a customer needs a consultant to assist with figuring out pricing and hosting, it's too complicated.
But this thread is about pricing. For citizen developers I think the pricing is high. Consider a typical "citizen developer" who is an exec in a department and thinks, "I want to experiment with putting seven people on a custom app to get us organized. Based upon actions rather than words, FM is better off marketing to pro developers and dropping citizen developers entirely. Many of the executives who would be citizen developers are going to get frustrated very quickly and turn to other products, and will forever remember their bad experience.
My humble opinion is that as a company FileMaker needs to make a choice. If it wants wide adoption by pro devs it is going to have to vastly improve its marketing and create a pricing structure that is easy to figure out and adopt, and that allows pro devs to help clients experiment efficiently. If it wants to go for citizen developers it must bring its documentation and training into the 21st century and vastly improve its marketing.
Otherwise it can bump along like it has, playing to a niche market for pro devs and frustrating citizen devs. Yes, FMI strategy is a mystery. The cost is a bit prohibitive, particularly when there are new "upgrades" every year with minimal new functionality and you can guarantee one of your clients will not meet the OS requirement We developed a solution in and decided at the time to run it on a Windows server Previously we had a solution running on a Mac server and we had to be really careful with something breaking.
I agree a runtime would be beneficial to get more solutions out there and introduce more people to FileMaker. I'm interested to try the cloud solution if the price is right on that. Similar expierience here. Otherwise, it will cost FileMaker prices are still problematic here, when somebody with an existing VLA wants to add a few iPads It's nice to have a language where you can do virtually anything you want that's:. IDE plug-ins all free at least the 20 or so I've used.
No expensive plug-ins needed to do powerful programming. Even if FMP is your primary tool, being able to extend it using other techniques is extremely useful.
What percentage of the FileMaker user and developer base actually has the skill set to program in a language-based platform? Again cost comes from somewhere. Even if not strictly monetary.
What percentage of FileMaker custom apps actually need to process , records. Even in large enterprises, that often isn't the case. And if it is, it'sv1 hour during off-peak hours. You asked: "What percentage of the FileMaker user and developer base actually has the skill set to program in a language-based platform?
That's a great question, but away from the OP's question about pricing. The OP that posted the original issue clearly had that need. And, he was using FMP. I agree with you, that would be interesting to know. To your other point, I would counter that back to pricing and cost If I spend 5 hours writing something, say, in Java, that will save me over an hour each time I run it, then there is the investment in spending more time coding up front, right?
That Java code often runs against an FMP database, but not always. And, that's a good thing, isn't it? To wit, I can take the same logic and just point it to another vendor and guess what? It still works! It all gets down to what fits for a particular situation. FMP fits nicely here. This is me, personally, OK, but, as another cost example back to the OP's point , I don't want to have vendor lock-in with expensive FMP-only plug-ins and such when I can write platform independent logic that does the same thing for free.
FMP is fine for how I use it. I have no complaints for that limited again, for my needs use-case. Oh, and it wasn't ", records" as you wrote. In the OPs post to which I was referring, It was ,, million with 18,,, billion potential calculations.
I agree with pretty much everything in that post. I see I typed k instead of m. That's what I get for trying to type on my iPhone. One other consideration when you talk about spending 5 hours writing something that saves an hour every time it's run When does it run? Is it something I have to wait for? Does the script taking 1 hour or 2 hours or 10 sec to run matter? If it's run on the server, at night, and doesn't interfere with anything else?
For many FM users and developers citizen and professional developers , the value is not weighed against the technical standards. The developer now looks at his technology stack available to him and chooses the right tool. Which one is best? The cost calculation involves way more than just monetary cost. I've seen custom apps quoted in all of these scenarios for the same company. For the same custom app with the same requirements. Here are the numbers for the last set I had seen:. The technology stack where I work now is FM basically runs the entire company.
But there are some areas where we went with another technology or another platform because FM just wasn't the right fit. But cost, was never even in the discussion. Objective data below None of these data below are meant to suggest FMP isn't the right choice. For a more "realistic example" from your recent posting, I reduced the OP's dataset from ,, to 50, for the main ACC table and kept the for the sites table.
Below, Whether the speed difference makes any difference is totally subjective, but I'm amazed by it. Same computer. So, everything is the same, except FileMaker vs. Processing each row, starting at time Chunked: so far, and total calculations done. Time it took: 0. There were Pythagorean calculations and, due to loop optimization, the program saved 0 calculations, out of possible calculations. In the past if I tried to do the looping over even , rows inside FileMaker, it would take over an hour.
Again, whether it makes a difference is subjective. In my experience, yes, it makes a huge difference on which apps I could even consider FMP for. But, if you meant "write the web app", that time required would depend on what the web app was, what the requirements are.
In RFPs I respond to, I often run into non-functional requirements regarding performance where expected performance numbers for a particular specified test in the spec is noted and will be graded on relative to other RFP submissions. The 50 hours of development was relative to the development of the needed app, not to the standing up of the server. That only takes minutes.
In my experience, yes, it makes a huge difference on which apps I could even consider FMP for You had to bring up ice cream. For the pricing structure, I think VLA should start at 3 users. Concurrent connections are easier to manage, but users can be managed just as well.
Connections should be available individually Not in groups of 5. The other structure change I would like to see is more than connections per server.
As long as the connections are paid for it should be up to the admin to make sure the hardware will support however many connections Are needed for a given solution.
The limit was initially imposed because of technical limitations of WD. Now with FLT it is just a firm limit on total number of users.
On the other side of that argument, you can do much more for your client with the same money with platforms that don't have the high cost that FileMaker charges. It used to be priced better before FieMaker 13 was released and shared hosting was disallowed. I would just comment that FM has moved towards FLT licensing and for many of my clients, that makes sense, and it is supposed to make things easier. The one big omission with FM's direction is what to do with WebDirect for people who want to log in from the web for a single simple transaction.
For example, to have customers log in to place an order e. Those are great things for FM WebDirect to handle for many of my customers, but they are not going to pay a license for every one of those people to log in. Concurrent licensing is the answer to that, but it is both really expensive and going away in I wish that FM would not count in it's licensing connections that are by [Guest] access so that we can use FM for things like cart systems or web feedbacks from customers.
Basically for people that are not staff of the company using FM regularly and for which are not going to get FM credentials. This would make WebDirect much more useful for many of my clients. In general, my development costs are significantly higher than the FM software costs. Because of this, software costs are often incidental kind of like the price of the server. They are real costs, but do not play a big factor in the decision making for projects I work on since they are a minor portion of the overall cost.
Obviously, everyone would like free. But then FM would go out of business and we would not have this tool anymore. I think FM is fairly priced. It is not a super bargain, but it is not a rip off either. I think, more and more, small and mid-size companies are left behind since FMI try to push everybody to Server technology.
I'ld love to see more of my customers using FMPro instead of my Runtime solution but most of the negotiations end suddenly as soon as I mention the figures: CHF This leads back to the Question: FMI, who are your customers?
This is very highly subjective. I've been on both sides of this argument before. Times when FM was not the right answer. And times when it was. Do you remember FM Mobile? It has shifted the platform in a fantastic direction. But that is still only part of the overall project. There are few platforms that offer an integrated stack that is as easy to use. I've worked with many developers in other platforms that have a warehouse full of cool software tools they use to make development "easy".
Overall cost of those tools, still more than FM has ever cost me. Software cost aside. You pay expense somewhere. More for software, less in development time. Less for software, more in development time. Or the worst one I've faced, less for software, less for development time, extremely high cost in UX. The only thing I really wish they'd provide are FLT licenses for 2, 3, and 4 users, though their insistence on 5, 10, One of the big issues, and I will completely agree, with the pricing model is the grouping of users without the ability to purchase individually.
Having a pricing discount at 5, 10, Only being able to purchase in bundles of 5, 10, Not in the long term, at least. I think it's kind of like election returns, where for some reason people seem to value speed more than accuracy.
Here it's more like valuing administrative convenience for the FMI sales staff over customer service. This exactly. It's a relic of volume pricing. In my experience, the persons responsible for purchasing invariably recoil from buying 'more than they need,' and this inclination is only being reinforced by precisely the same market trends that, I believe, led to FLT in the first place- licensing software per user.
It seems unreasonable, but that's been my experience. Everyone seems fine with economies of scale, but fewer will go along with minimum purchases. All that being said- it's not a huge complaint, not on my part at least. I've been really happy with FMI of late. I kind of get what you mean And they just don't care if it's 3, 5, or The response to that recoil is that if the business needs an extra license it's already included in the package.
What do your clients have to say in response to that? Managing license keys becomes an issue and might require FMS to register via web regularly if you want specific numbers licensed. Well, that's not "the one" big omission, but yes.
In the meantime, Airtable and Knack and Caspio and other systems are making certain things possible that are basically not possible in FileMaker, and that's potentially awkward for us FileMaker developers This is a complicated issue and I don't pretend to understand it well, but I'm pretty sure "fairly priced" is in the eye of the beholder. Seemed like a fair price at the time circa Of course I believe that FileMaker allows me to provide value to my clients that they can't get otherwise without spending as much or more.
Nevertheless, even small savings matter to people. They couldn't care less about FileMaker. They don't use it. They're not programming their own reports, building their own little databases. FileMaker to them is like a dongle they have to buy to use the software I've written for them. To them it's in the same class as web browsers and pdf readers, except that web browsers and Adobe's pdf reader software are free. That's a non-trivial part of the total cost of the system I've built for them.
I believe they're getting value for money and apparently they think so too, so we're all happy. And it was "free" or nearly so.
We're rolling along here merrily as of early Maybe this can continue for a couple years. It ain't gonna continue like this forever. I've been through revolutions like this a couple times now—most recently in the field of photography. Between and roughly digital cameras were selling like hotcakes. There was a huge boom in the number of people trying to make money as photographers.
It seemed like a renaissance for a while. Now getting work as a photographer is almost like getting work as a harpsichord repairman. Camera manufacturers like Pentax, Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon and even Sony are hanging on to life by their fingernails. The digital capture technology that blossomed from or so kept on blossoming until one day people woke up to find that smart phones were way more widely used than any interchangeable lens cameras.
BUT everybody has a smart phone with them all the time, they have the feeling that the camera in their smart phone is "free" you know, it just comes with the phone , and using the camera is simplicity itself. We're in Less is More territory in the world of photography and I think it's been happening in the world of software too for some years. Does not matter how much sense it makes: More is More becomes an increasingly hard sell. Not that I'm asking. But it would be interesting to know what the annual revenue is for the company.
I'm not really disagreeing with you here. Just thinking out loud. There are 3 ways to really go businesses. FileMaker cost in the above theoretical scenario is literally 0. FileMaker cost is still only 0. Ponderings on your very interesting post. A couple of things strike me about the pricing.
This is one of them. Many collaboration software packages have a pricing structure where "internal" users are priced differently than "external" users, meaning people inside the company same domain, usually vs outsiders. This gives the product a means of self-selling. They say "Wow, I like this software. Maybe I should use this at my company for my group.
FMP doesn't have a free or inexpensive method of doing this, and definitely doesn't have an easy onramp. The other thing that strikes me is that free tiers are standard now and FM doesn't have one. You pro developers know the strategy: this is to capture the other principal method of viral adoption. With a free tier, a little league team coach could create an app for the team roster with pictures, the parents' phone numbers, emergency numbers, schedule, etc.
The other parents say "Wow, this way better than an Excel spreadsheet. How did you do this? It seems to me that FMP should also become a business standard. The key would be separating the concept of a developer license paid and a user license that connects to anyone's FMP database app without an additional fee so long as that little app is little. Thus the little league team roster is free to the team and parents either Go or web, or hopefully a "Go" for MacOS and Windows.
The next tier is when one of those little league parents decides to use FMP for a small project at work and the data amount increases over the free threshold. The client app or web is still free or nearly free at this level. Both groups of these viral customers then get self-upsold when they decide to adopt FMP for bigger projects, and at that level they pay the normal rate.
These measures would cost FM nothing. As it is, FMP isn't considered for these lower two tiers and it's not going to be. Not a chance.
Thus this is effectively a free promotion. For those clients That example was specifically for a business with users. That employee base dictates higher revenue. And with the current starter pack you can even get FMPA included for free. Limited time offer. I agree that it doesn't count on bigger installations, but we got customers with a maximum budget of K, new hardware inclusive since FM doesn't support more than the last 2 OSX, some hardware must be replaced.
Some of them need 2 iPod's for integrating a 'picture-station' into a solution, ie for getting passport as a picture. Today, they been left alone. If their company grows, they won't buy FM anymore. Remeber the times when car-schools were using BMW's or Audi's?
It's an interesting position. Should FMI cripple the product to maintain customers who can't afford it? Far too often, smaller customers have said "I can't afford that My budget But at some point, you have to value your skills higher. Get higher paying clients.
Then one could offer discount services to this customers. And sometimes even purchase old hardware from this higher end clients and repurpose out fur lower budget clients. I don't mean to sound cold, but setting a budget without understanding the need will cripple their business and yours. Unfortunately, there are alternatives for accounting, planning, HR, etc. It's the thing with the car-driver-school. Not being critical depends partially on the business. CAD, or example, is great for what it does.
However, it seems you undervalue the rest the business operations. They are not a client for an accounting custom app. As for small businesses being "done", reread my post.
If the business is really that small, you approach may be different. Mentor them to build their own app. As they grow, you can step in to polish up some features or take over completely. This is all part of being creative and stabilizing our own business. I think Markus's car analogy is apt.
He's saying that it's unrealistic to expect a teenager getting her first car to drive off the lot with a Lexus, Lamborghini, Cadillac, Infiniti, or Continental. But if, while she's in there picking out her Yaris, Beetle, Sonic, Versa, or Fiesta, one of those luxury models catches her eye on the other side of the showroom, she's likely to remember it in a few years IF she's been satisfied with her low-budget entry-level product — as well as the post-purchase service she's gotten on it from the dealership.
The plea — which I think is apt — is for FileMaker Inc. But, as it is, it's more like they're saying "We really want to sell you a car for every member of your family, not just this one SUV, so why don't you think about it for a couple of years and then come back and talk to us again when you're ready. FMI has shorten their free trial period 30 days to 15 , and starting with FMS 15, does not allow for low entry cost, shared hosting.
Individual developers and users can not avail themselves to annual licensing reducing entry cost. All team licensing, FM cloud, and connections start at a minimum of 5 users except that the server comes with one connection.
Ok, on occasion, especially prior to a new version release, there will be 2 for 1 deals, or value packages.. Bottom line is the direction of FMI does not appear to be going in the direction that you recommend, and that is a shame. As a small business that has been with FM since v3, I find it to be a great benefit to us. The problem is the FMLT break points of 5 and That is huge!! Small businesses don't mine paying to use software, WE mind paying for unused Software!
FileMaker please rearrange the breakpoints. Say for example Server License for X and each user for Y. I think that would help the small business guy as well as the FM developers. So a bit to unpack there. Keep in mind, I completely agree with the need to lower the cost of entry. Before a purchase is made. That is how you attract younger developers.
FMI feels the same way. See this DevCon session from last year. Car analogy. I understand the point. I don't disagree with it.
Your extension of the analogy raises a few questions in my mind about it. And again, this doesn't express favor for or disagreement with. This is critical thinking. I rarely have needed to tell a customer that they need to come back when they are ready.
I have on occasion moved to more of a business consulting role. They simply can't afford to buy custom software. That's perfectly fine. I will help move them in a direction to help their business without breaking them. That relationship will often lead to a long term relationship. One that, down the road, leads to me building them custom software. We often get in the mindset that it's all or nothing. If something doesn't work on the first try, it doesn't mean give up. Be a partner, or consultant, to the business owner, and it will be a better relationship than just being, and forgive the wording, a code monkey.
Lastly, Bento. Yes, we all learned a lot from that. Here is the business concern for FileMaker, or really any company. If you put out a low-cost, or no-cost, product. Your internal expenses will go up dramatically. So that is something FileMaker, Inc has to account for. The more resources they have to dedicate to supporting customers that can't afford buy the product, the fewer resources they have to continue to improve the product.
I've said it before. Everything costs, somewhere. I know several developers that released "free" sample files. No concept that the developer's time is worth something. I have personally received vulgar, shameful private messages because I wasn't willing to finish building a database for someone I helped on the forums, for free. Now let me tell you about the absolute BEST record albums of all time The issue is that FileMaker thinks they are enterprise class software and charging like it, when in reality, they are medium to small business software.
Maybe you are right. In my experience, having seen many, many quotes for enterprise class software, FM is still significantly lower cost than most of the other options.
Sure it has areas where it needs improvement. But the areas where its power resides, other platforms either fall flat, or require an additional software and or development referencing separate front-end and back-end development teams. Furthermore, FMI's products seem to be becoming more expensive, more restrictive, etc. Aside from container field bugs long ago reported that have never been patched that make the driver workable for only somethings without a lot of extra code, the FMI JDBC driver only works on the same machine unless, you're shelling out for FMS, naturally, which I assume is the whole point.
And, that single restriction keeps me from using FMP on some projects, not using FMP more as is probably the "marketing" intent. I say "marketing" intent since there is no technical reason I can think of to restrict a driver's use. By contrast, companies like MS and Oracle do everything in their power to encourage developers.
I have never gotten that feeling at all from FMI. It will be interesting to see how FMI does in the next few years. From what I've seen they're coming out with, I see no reason to upgrade anytime soon. That sentiment may be just me, of course, But it sounds like others have similar feelings. In full disclosure, there are times I've felt this way also. Watch the video I posted earlier. It will no doubt take some more time and more of a culture shift to complete that move, but it's happening already.
From product direction to changes in marketing. This shift is very encouraging to me, personally. It's a bit sad that there is no way I can share that experience easily. It's been a road of building a trusting relationship with FMI as a company.
And with employees. It's been beneficial, and at the same time opened my eyes to the challenges they face. And also at the progress they have made in recent years.
With more to come. I must say that I have been very very impressed with the FMI employees I've had a chance to interact with. You and others keep saying things are changing, Maybe they are, but there is NO evidence of this.
In fact, it's quite the other way around. Every so many months it just gets worse. Most of the complaints I see in this thread I've seen since I started my business in Not to say they're not valid, but I feel like FMI is listening more than ever and I like the direction they're going.
What changes are you expecting to see? If you are talking strictly about pricing, it's not realistic to expect to see a reduction in price. Pricing hasn't changed much, per se, since The model changed. Yeah, I get that. It has made FM more expensive in a good number of scenarios. But to say that there have not been any changes, I'm not really sure what you are looking at.
For a company the size of FileMaker, and associated with Apple. Change will be slow in some areas. But the product has improved sooo much over the past several years. Use 15 for 6 months. Then go back and use Or You will feel the changes.
FileMaker is still marking down the road of increasing pricing. FileMaker is waking up regarding the roadmap and making Dev Con videos available, but they should have been doing that long ago. It's like praising your child for doing their homework after not doing it for years. Regarding MS who I was a big fan of for decades and have been developing with Access since version 2, and VB since version 3 , they have discourage many developers who depended on:.
LightSwitch rapid application development no longer being updated , and. I personally was burnt with LightSwitch, which i thought would replace my Access development. And Access has morphed into a completely different product, and is being excluded from more and more Office subscriptions. So, I value a company that depends on a product for their bread and butter, and I am willing to pay for that dedication.
And the costs keep escalating.
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