I think this is always an issue that people have to think through when they work with a software as service. How do we know that Flickr will be around in a year and/or what they’ll charge? In the end, we don’t. Will it be easy to pull down your images? Maybe, but it’s a calculated risk. Of course, one of the factors is price and at our new pricing levels we feel we’ll have long term sustainable business growth. In terms of exporting content, refer to some of my earlier comments in which I explain why the content in Sprout is platform dependent.

Does the Enterprise edition allow for exporting or are the Enterprise customers taking the same gamble?

Our solution is available to private users and we have many who have taken up our offer of a $2,999 account. The fact is that the costs associated with providing this service necessitate moving towards enterprise clients. That said, we do believe that the cost of getting the Adobe product and coming up to speed with it would actually cost more due to the steep learning curve. Plus, we’ve already got relationships with partners that allows us to plug into their systems (YouTube, for example).

We’re sorry that you’re leaving and hope you’ll consider working with Sprout again for larger scale projects.

Again we’re very sorry that your pages will be affected by the sunsetting of this product. We believe that those users who have had success with Sprout will be good candidates for the enterprise level product. Perhaps you can find ways to get more value from the platform in order to justify the subscription price. Considering how powerful Sprout Builder is, the price of other software packages online, and the bandwidth costs of serving Sprouts we believe this is an affordable offering. Also, keep in mind that the $2,999 is targeted towards existing customers, not new customers. Our enterprise customers typically come in at a significantly higher level.

We’re trying to respond to those comments where we can provide useful information. There are plenty of places to vent frustration, but we hope this post will be a place people can find relevant information. For example, many complaints have come in about exporting sprouts and we posted to explain why this is not actually possible with our technology.

We would have given folks the possibility of export if it was possible. However, due to the technology that underlies that Sprout platform the widgets that it creates cannot live without being attached to the platform itself. We realize this is a major inconvenience which is why existing Sprouts will run for three months before shutting down.