Tasty dim sum today, fresh shrimp yum.

Figured the revenue model out for Concrete 5 today at lunch. We knew we were gonna give the source away, but hadn't quite figured out how to offer a hosted one for a price. We wanted to make it easy for tired old developers like me to setup a site quickly, as you would a blog and take the opportunity to make some money on the hosting side. We also think the elegant ‘demo turns into your install' approach of so many web2.0 apps is nice.

Well the challenge with that for us is unlike Wordpress or Basecamp, we need to give people a fair amount of personalization and space. A website isn't much good without a email, our CMS shines most when one starts to mess with the presentation layer, you just have to deliver a non-centralized traditional hosting environment for it to be useful and stable in the big picture.

That becoming clear helped settle the details around our how to price hosting. The demo simply isn't gonna happen without a credit card. You're welcome to download the source, see examples, etc.. but if you want to "1-2-3 it's just that easy" on our servers, we're gonna need a credit card and real info. Keep yer l33t warez off my boxes.