Bits du Jour and Omega Sync Pro - Mon, 16 Aug 2010

I found out about Bits du Jour several years ago. It is a website where software developers offer their software at a discount price, but for just one day only. Often the discount is 30%, 50%, or more.

A few weeks ago, I ran into it again, and this time I decided to subscribe to their RSS feed so I could follow their new offerings every day. Saturday night, as I was working on Behold close to midnight, an RSS post from Bits du Jour told me about a special for a program called Omega Sync Pro. It was a program to synchronize the data in your databases. It was being offered just on August 15th for $49.00, which was 86% off its regular price of $349.00.

I maintain two versions of my databases. One is the live databases on my webhost, which includes this blog, Behold’s Forum, my GenSoftReviews site, and a couple of others. The other is a copy of the live ones which I have on my computer that I use for both development and backup.

The problem that I’ve had up to now is that it is a royal pain to use PhpMyAdmin on Netfirms to manually download the databases to my own machine. They do not have a full version of PhpMyAdmin and it is very cumbersome and slow. As I result, I wasn’t doing my backups nearly as often as I needed to. I considered a WordPress Backup plugin to download the databases, but there were problems with those as well.

Then Omega Sync got my attention. I downloaded the trial and tested it out. It had a few glitches but overall worked wonderfully. It was like Beyond Compare, but for Databases. Beyond Compare is a program that I love and use all the time for updating my website files, doing comparisons between various versions of Behold, and for backing up my computer.

Omega Sync not only can syncronize my data. It also can syncronize my database schema, and I really like their one-way-sync, which will ensure for me that my computer will be sync’d to what I’ve got up on the web. It checks for differences and is fast, fast, fast. Instead of taking minutes or hours, it can sync twenty tables in one of my databases in about 20 seconds. It can show me the differences right down to the record and field. And it can work between different database types or versions.

The glitches were of the form of an Abend, and came up with a Send Error Box, similiar to what I put in Behold. I pressed the send button and continued. It happened three times while setting up the database settings, but they were minor problems and program continued.

I couple of minutes later, I got an email from the developer, asking about the error I encountered. I gave back information about how they happened, and then we exchanged a few emails about a few small improvements I was suggesting. I really didn’t expect to hear back from someone so quickly after I sent the problem in. Actually, I didn’t expect to hear from anyone at all.

Less than 10 minutes after I had downloaded it, I then went out and purchased the program for the $49.

I, like anyone, really appreciate a deal. I doubt if I would have paid $349 for that program, but at $49 it was a real steal. They made a sale that they probably wouldn’t have. And I even recommended the program to someone else that day and I think he bought it as well.

But as much as I’ve gained out of Bits du Jour, I have to tell you that I will not ever be putting Behold up there at a discount rate. Why not? They sold 2 extra copies of Omega Sync that they wouldn’t have. True. But I don’t want to make any of my purchasers mad. And as happy as you make people who get a deal, you make your other purchasers who purchased at full price quite angry. I’ve had that feeling too. I purchased AQTime very reluctantly for $599, but I needed it to properly optimize Behold. And I would have been darned angry if a month later, I found out it was selling on Bits du Jour at a heavily discounted price.

Behold will always be priced so that you will never get Behold at a lower price than its current price. I’ll only raise the price as time goes on and features get added. With free lifetime upgrades, your best deal will always be to buy Behold now, and you’ll never be tempted to wait around for a deal (like Bits du Jour) to come around to buy it. Besides, Behold will never be priced outrageously, so a huge saving would not even be possible. And while talking about it, I should mention Behold’s special pre-release price of $20 won’t last much longer. When Version 1 is out, it will be going to at least $40. So consider supporting me a bit and buying it now.

So Bits du Jour is a nice site to follow to get good deals. I did, and I’ll continue to monitor it for future deals and I recommend you do as well. But don’t ever expect to see Behold there.