david_obrien

Thanks, those are great tips and I've just implemented some of those.

Thanks again, this is super helpful!

Thanks for the further details.

Did you see the short video on the first page? It's a bit further down and might need to be pulled up. We have two other videos under "Resources/Videos" as well.

I am currently working on a "longer demo video" that shows ARGOS's full potential and differentiation.

Thanks!

Based on my understanding of CloudGuard we differentiate again by the "automated investigation" we do. It's not just a "you have misconfigured this thing here" but then also "because of that misconfiguration this following resource is now exposed to the internet (we checked, it is!) and it's exposing these other resources as well, look, here's a diagram that shows you this."

This is what products like CloudGuard expect you to manually do. They approach security from a compliance point of view. "You are violating control XYZ from framework ABC, so you are less secure." Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

An AWS EC2 instance should not have a Security Group on it that allows RDP from the internet, that's true and should probably be flagged, but in itself is not a security issue. It only is if the EC2 has a public IP (or a public Load Balancer), the VPC has an internet gateway and there's no NACL blocking the traffic. This is just one part of what ARGOS checks, what others just don't and expect you to do manually, for each of their hundreds and thousands of critical detections.

oh wow, never noticed. I will see if I can disable that. That's an odd one.

I am indeed. I've seen those issues one too many times as a consultant, and I never got to really(!) fix them as I was only ever brought in as a band aid really, not strategically.

Yeah, CNAPP is the new acronym for where we probably best fit right now. I will continue checking out some of the other players.

I initially had a 14 day trial, then people (not potential customers) told me that would not be long enough, so I increased it to 30. That did not make a difference at all. Smaller companies still signed up and converted, larger companies "ignored" any time limits and just assume that those don't apply to them.

Based on all the comments now I wonder if I should have a "base" plan that has the cost on the website and an Enterprise / Custom plan with a "Contact us" button. I pretty much know what a customer costs "on average", so that's not difficult.

Curious, did you see the short demo video on the website? There is a short one on the main site "below the fold" and there are two more in the "Resources/Videos" section. I am working on a longer version that I can send out to potential customers instead of a demo initially. Yeah, I've seen and felt the "single pain of glass" many times :D

I'd love to take you up on that offer, thanks, a lot!

I appreciate that comment, thanks. It does feel a bit like a catch22, that I am definitely trying to solve.

ARGOS does have early paying customers, and of course they are heavily discounted (and they know).

You mention not telling a price is an issue (and so have others, point taken), but also say I shouldn't focus on price right now. I'm trying not to. So, what's your recommendation? Should I remove the page? Rename it to something like "Plans" and not "Pricing"? But then I'm still not telling you how much it will be. I know how to deal with this when talking to someone, but what I'd be really interested in what you would expect on a website, knowing what you told me.

Seriously, thanks!

I used to be a consultant building exactly those designs, limit the blast radius, have separate accounts etc.

"In the earlier days" of ARGOS that's exactly why I didn't charge per Account, but different ways (tried # of resources, then % of spend) and people were always confused.

Similar to the "take the price off the website" that customers told me, me charging per Account is also what customers asked me to do.

What do you think would a good unit be for a product like this? I'm happy to try anything really, as long as it helps companies be more secure.

Thanks, I'll definitely look into that.

Thanks for that detailed response. ARGOS definitely feels more like an Enterprise / larger SMB product, unfortunately, I think this is mostly due to where people are really feeling "the need" for cloud security. I had many conversations with smaller organisations / startups and most of them said that they could not spend money on something like cloud security (AV and Firewall was #1 spend in those conversations, very interesting) or sometimes even didn't believe that cloud security was a problem ("doesn't Microsoft/Amazon take care of this for me?").

So, as much as I'd like to help smaller organisations, it seems only at a certain size do people really recognise this as a problem.

What do you think? Also, what made the site "targeted at Enterprise" in your opinion?

Also, yes, ARGOS is, for now, only public cloud, no private cloud.

Thanks again.

That bot is gone now. Thanks for letting me know.

I had to "save a bit" on the web designer, sorry. Focus was more on the product. The chat bot should have already been removed. I will do that asap.

Thanks for your comment. As I mentioned to others, I followed what other companies are doing and what actual customers (not just Enterprises) asked me to do.

If I just put a "contact us for pricing" button onto the website, would that make you check the rest out and potentially sign up for a trial?

Also, ARGOS is still early and the pricing, to be completely transparent, is still very custom depending on the value a company communicates to me. It's not meant as a trick, otherwise I wouldn't give out a free trial for 14 days to everybody without even asking for a credit card. It's genuinely a "I don't really know yet how much to charge as a baseline".

Again, fair comment. Frankly, I'm still figuring out what this would be worth to smaller organisations. ARGOS really scales by AWS Account / Azure Subscription / GCP Project right now and I'm currently charging "for each...".

I know what Enterprises are paying for ARGOS and some larger SMB, but not clear on what value smaller orgs or even startups assign to this problem.

It's a fair comment, and I used to have prices on the website and then actual customers, while they were on their way to becoming customers, told us to take the prices offline. Their procurement teams really didn't like prices on the website. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. The trial is completely free, we don't ask for a credit card, only when you decide to want to become a customer, you can actually see the self service prices in your ARGOS dashboard. Those prices are also available via the Azure/AWS marketplaces.