cnMaestro X pricing

With the release of cnMaestro 3.2 the era of getting on-premise cnMaestro X for free is over, we have around 2000 devices in multiple tiers for our business, PMP450, ePMP, cnWave, Enterprise WiFi , cnMatrix, cnWave 60GHz, PTP670, and PTP820s, how do you justify paying for this per device? Why does it need to include Cambium Care Pro? I just want to be able to manage my devices.

Is anyone else in this situation?

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When you say just want to manage your devices, is the free cnMaestro Essentials not sufficient for you?

I do agree that the bundling of CC Pro can be frustrating if it is indeed inflating the price of the management license, which is what most people actually want from X in my experience.

Forgot to mention the monitoring too, but unfortunately, we would need X for cnMatrix switch management, MSP features, and long term data retention. There’s probably a few more features we use without realizing it’s an X feature…

This is a misunderstanding - cnMaestro X is not required for cnMatrix management.

(cnMaestro X is still required for MSP features and long term data retention)

Thanks for the clarification Simon, none of the resources I’ve found have been really that clear on what exactly is the difference between Essentials and X, and what I actually would need to purchase licenses for.

Like for MSP accounts, would I need to buy a license for only the devices that would be in the MSP account? And what about reporting, would I only be able to run reports on devices that are licensed? And if how does the system know which devices are and aren’t counted in my licensing, am I expected to license them all regardless if I only wanted to license what’s in my MSPs?

cnMaestro X is enabled at the account level, not the device level. You need a license for each (non-Free Tier) device in the account, at which point the account will upgrade to cnMaestro X. There is no way to enable cnMaestro X features for a subset of devices.

Since MSP accounts are a cnMaestro X feature, you also need cnMaestro X licenses for all the devices in your MSP accounts.

cnPilot R-series devices are part of the Free Tier and do not require a license.

So say I have 100 PMP450 SM’s would I just need to buy 1x MSX-SUB-T1-1 to unlock the x features of those 100 devices or would have have to buy 100x MSX-SUB-T1-1?

If you want to manage all 100 devices on the same instance, it’s 100 licenses. If you buy just one license, then you only have one slot to fill.

You would have to have the other 99 on a separate Essentials account, which isn’t practical in this scenario.

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A belated follow-up: as of a few weeks ago, Tier 1 devices (PMP and ePMP subscriber modules) are now part of the free tier. The MSX-SUB-T1-1/3/5 subscriptions are no longer required.

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Does that mean the Tier 1 devices will have more than 7 days data retained?

Not exactly.

cnMaestro X is an account-level feature, not a device-level feature. If you have upgraded your account to cnMaestro X (by purchasing subscriptions for all the non-free-tier devices), then all devices will gain the longer-term data retention. If you have not upgraded, all devices are still limited to 7 days.

The cnMaestro website has a data sheet download that will help clarify what constitues cnMaestro X features. You can find that here: Connected Device and Network Management with cnMaestro X

TBH, with the exception of mass firmware updates, all many WISPs want to do is monitor CPE signal levels and modulation over a couple of years so we can determine if a radio’s performance has degraded. Many don’t need all the other support, managed WiFi, CBRS SAS (not useful outside USA) and other features that CNMaestro X offers and if we did, it wouldn’t be across our whole deployment so the account-level pricing makes zero sense.

Please just remove the 7 day data retention “hobble” from CNMaestro on premises as it’s ridiculous that open source NMS gives us more useful graphing and alerts on Cambium equipment than Cambium’s own software.

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cnMaestro is not free for Cambium to develop, but we give away a significant portion of the functionality for free in cnMaestro Essentials. cnMaestro X allows us to continue to develop the product by charging the people who get the most value from it. If you don’t get any value from it, you shouldn’t pay for it. If there is an open source NMS that is more useful to you, you should obviously use that instead.

It’s possible that we will introduce different pricing options in the future with different sets of features, and perhaps those will be a better match for your needs.

All I’m saying is that a couple of other popular radio manufacturers provide free NMS software that meets typical WISPs requirements and that’s a large reason why many persevere with their equipment even if their radios aren’t as good. The 7 day data retention on CNMaestro on premises is the single biggest issue with CNMaestro as we have to graph signals etc via SNMP on a separate NMS. Monthly fees for advanced features (some of which look really good) are fine but not for basic functionality. Price it in the cost of the hardware if you must.

Provide decent free management software for your hardware - sell more hardware. Simples.

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Ah, you want Cambium to charge more for our radios :wink: ?

In all seriousness, your feedback is very much appreciated. Setting the price for something like cnMaestro is not easy. It is used by customers in very different markets, such as WISPs, managed service providers and enterprise networks, each of whom have different needs and usage patterns. The change to stop charging for subscriber modules was made specifically to help WISPs.

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Ah SEE, SEE he said it. The costs are already rolled in. LOL

I jest of course.

My main complaint was less about the Pricing and more about the cloud requirement. Defeats the purpose of On-Prem

When upgrading to a modern version of cnm, do you still get a trial period for X features? IIRC it was 30 days or so before?