CompuServe Messages

In this particular market, that's the price range of the software from several vendors. Our particular vendor has sold several hundre packages, but they expect users to pay that heavy support fee every year, too. They haven't many employees, but there are more than four people there. The alternative is usually buying the service from an outside firm (sort of like payroll). The attraction is that potential clients believe it will be cheaper to do it themselves, and they'll provide better service than a third party. So there's a strong incentive. But these are not very sophisticated products. One is written in Omnis 3.3's procedural language, another in Clipper-compiled dBASE. Even running on a $10K computer, they run slowly. So it's reasonable to hack your own, customized to your needs.