(image hotlinked from Axosoft)
Seriously.
There’s a crazy deal being offered by Axosoft. Buy a 5-user version of their $500 software suite for $5, but the offer expires February 24th (2006). The link to buy the software is here – and only available on blogs. Axosoft is trying a social marketing experiment to see if they can promote their products and brand via the blog universe. It isn’t clear at what hour the offer expires, so you might want to get it on the 23rd.
Check out the demo (6 minutes). We bought the software immediately after watching the demo today. Axosoft is donating the $5 to the American Red Cross. They have already raised over $2400. I love their explanation of why it’s $5 and not free:
When we decided to move forward with this offer, we wanted to make it free. However, the Axosoft Online Store currently doesn’t have a way to do $0 transactions. All purchases through the store must have a positive dollar value. Rather than spending the time and resources to update the store to allow $0 transactions, we decided to go ahead and charge a nominal fee and donate the money to the Red Cross.
The first positive sign (for us) about the folks at Axosoft. They make rational investment decisions.
After digging around on their site, we found that they (at least for now) also have two ways to get the software for free.
OnTime 2006 installs as a 30-day multi-user trial for up to 12 users for evaluation. An activation key is NOT Required! However, for a free single-user activation key of OnTime that never expires, with no limitations (a $200 Value!), visit the Key Request Page.
Aren’t you glad you found the link at Tyner Blain?
The second positive sign about the folks at Axosoft.
After the purchase, we got a personal (form letter) email from their president, Hamid Shojaee. Marginally useful. In that email, he mentions that we should have received our product activation key in an automated email. We hadn’t. I replied to his email, and 9 minutes later had both a response from Mr. Shojaee (including my activation key) and the automated email with the activation key. With hundreds of purchases in two days, the fact that their president took the time to reply (with no way of knowing that it would show up as good PR here), impressed us again.
Is it any good?
Honestly, we don’t know yet. Since their offer is so short lived, we wanted to get the post out asap – if it is great, then getting it for $5 (or free, if you’re a one-man-shop) is fantastic. So, we’re joining in and spreading the word too. We can tell you that the windows client installs very easily and also uninstalls very easily. It does require a SQLServer database connection, so it isn’t a 30-second install. But if it isn’t what you want, it is a 30-second uninstall.
