We hear a version of the same story more often than you’d think: an organization gets in touch because their current booking system is going away. Sometimes the vendor got acquired and folded into a bigger platform. Sometimes a “free” tool they’d come to depend on quietly shut down. Sometimes a school management system swallowed the booking module they liked and replaced it with one they didn’t.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same – a business manager or facilities coordinator staring down a migration they didn’t ask for, hoping the data export comes out clean.

We’ve been building MIDAS since 2006, and stories like that are a big part of why we still are. So we wanted to write plainly about what we think actually matters when you’re choosing software that a school, a church, or a community group is going to depend on for years, not months – and where we think MIDAS earns its place.

The deployment question nobody else lets you ask

Almost every booking system on the market today makes one decision for you before you’ve even seen a demo: it will live on someone else’s servers, in someone else’s cloud, under someone else’s terms. For a lot of organizations that’s completely fine. For a lot of others – schools with strict data protection obligations, churches wary of where congregation data ends up, government bodies with procurement rules that basically require it – that’s a non-starter.

MIDAS is one of the few systems left that genuinely lets you choose.

Run it on your own server, behind your own firewall, backed up on your own schedule, and your booking data never has to leave the building. Or let us host it, if server maintenance isn’t something you want on your plate. Either way works, and – this is the part people are often surprised by – you can move between the two later if your circumstances change. Most vendors only built one option, so they don’t offer that choice at all.

Why “since 2006” is actually a selling point

Here’s a number that we think says more about MIDAS than any feature list could: the median organization using MIDAS today has been with us for over nine years. Not nine months. Nine years.

We bring this up not to boast but because we think it answers the real question underneath “which software should we buy?” – which is really “will this still be here, and will it still work, in five years?“

A lot of the room booking space right now is genuinely unstable: companies get bought, folded into bigger suites, sunset, rebranded, repriced. MIDAS has been continuously developed since 2006, and we’re not trying to get acquired or chasing a quarterly roadmap review that might decide room booking is no longer “core.” It’s the whole business, and it has been for twenty years.

Pricing that doesn’t need a phone call to understand

Plenty of software in this space keeps its pricing behind a “contact sales” button – in fact in our own research we found that almost a third of software vendors don’t publish pricing – and we’ve never liked that as an approach.

So MIDAS doesn’t work that way. Every price is published, openly, on our website, based on exactly two things – how many venues you need and how many users you need. No per-booking charges that punish you for actually using the software. No mystery enterprise tier that only reveals itself after a demo. You can work out your exact cost in about thirty seconds, and when it’s time to renew, the price is the same standard rate you already know (subject to currency fluctuations), not some number that’s crept up while you weren’t looking.

If you’re the person who has to justify a line item to a board, a council, or a budget committee, that kind of transparency tends to matter more than people expect.

We’re not trying to be everything

This one took us a while to say plainly, so let’s just say it: MIDAS is not a church management system. It’s not a school information system. It’s not a facilities maintenance platform. If what you actually need is one giant piece of software that handles giving, attendance, gradebooks, and work orders as well as room bookings, there are products built for exactly that, and we’d rather tell you that upfront than pretend otherwise.

What we have noticed, though, is that booking is usually the thing those all-in-one systems treat as an afterthought – a module maintained alongside features that matter more to the wider platform. The organizations that come to MIDAS from a bundled suite tend to say some version of the same thing: booking finally works the way they need it to, and everything else they were using keeps doing its job right alongside it. MIDAS is built to integrate with the tools you already run, not to replace them.

If any of this sounds familiar

Maybe your team is juggling a shared calendar and a spreadsheet of “who’s using the hall Thursday.” Maybe you’re facing a migration because a system you relied on is being discontinued or absorbed elsewhere. Maybe you just want to know, in plain numbers, what a proper booking system would actually cost your organization.

Either way, there’s no obligation to talk to anyone first. Try MIDAS free for 30 days with your own rooms and your own schedule, or just look up your exact price right now.

Start your free 30-day trial – no credit card required.

See pricing for your organization – published openly, no sales call needed.

The post What Twenty Years of Building Booking Software Has Taught Us appeared first on MIDAS - Room Booking System | Blog.

Back in 2017 we increased the length of the free trial periods of our MIDAS room booking system from 14 days to 30.

Six years on, and we were curious to revisit this and try to understand if this is still the most suitable duration to offer for a software trial.

To that end, we began by researching what our competitors currently offer in this regard.

We analyzed 64 online software vendors who develop room booking / scheduling / appointment systems.

The results were quite surprising!

Nealy 44% of vendors we looked at didn’t offer any form of “free trial”!

Of those who did, the most common length of free trial offered was 30 days, with 18 businesses offering this. 30 days is also the length of free trial that we currently offer for MIDAS.

The second most common length of free trial was 14 days – which is what we previously used to offer for MIDAS. A total of 10 out of the 64 software vendors analyzed offered a 14 day (two week) free trial.

Of the remaining vendors we looked at, the shortest free trial period offered was just 3 days. The longest on offer was 90 days.

What is the best duration to offer for a free software trial?

The best duration for a free software trial largely depends on the complexity and capabilities of the booking system being evaluated. As we found, some software vendors offer trials that last just a few days, while others offer trials that last for several months.

Now some more “basic” scheduling systems may be easy for prospective customers to evaluate within a few days.

Others may require more time to fully test and evaluate all the product’s features and capabilities.

This is primarily the reason why we previously increased our free trial period from 14 to 30 days.

We were finding that some prospective customers were reaching the end of their 14 day trial and were then requesting a 1-2 week extension so they could complete their evaluation. In most cases, we were generally able to extend 14 day trials upon request. However, over time as we added more features and functionality to our booking software, we decided that there was quite a lot to evaluate and digest in just 14 days.

We certainly didn’t want prospective customers to feel “rushed” into evaluating our product.

That’s why we increased our free trial period length to 30 days, to allow extra time for users to get a good feel for what MIDAS is all about.

Since we did this, we’ve had far fewer requests for extensions to free trial periods.

Would an even longer free trial period not be better?

Looking at our our own data, we don’t believe so. On average, those prospective customers who evaluate a free MIDAS trial make their decision within 21 days of the start of their trial period.

That’s why we still feel that offering a 30 day trial is still the best length.

Some vendors offer considerably longer trial periods. One of the reasons for very lengthy trial periods may be because purchasing their solution ties you in to a long and potentially expensive contract, and so potential customers want to take extra time to evaluate their potential long-term commitment.

However, there are potential drawbacks to offering longer trial periods (a couple of our competitors offer 90 day trials for instance);

1. Firstly, people have limited attention spans and may not be willing to to commit to a long trial period. If a prospective customer can’t get a good “feel” for your product within 30 days, it’s unlikely that they will. (or it’s likely that the software is far too complex for them to be able to readily get to grips with)
2. Secondly, the computing resources needed. These days, it’s fair to say that the majority of room booking, scheduling, and appointment systems are online. The days of stand-alone, downloadable software packages have all but gone. Therefore, for each free software trial, that system has to be “hosted” somewhere, at a cost to the vendor. A free trial that lasts for 90 days will cost a vendor three times as much as a trial that lasts for 30 days.

What about those vendors who don’t offer ANY free trial?

Going back to our analysis of 64 software vendors, 28 of them (44%) didn’t offer any “free trial” period.

We did however find that 22 (79%) of these vendors instead encouraged prospective customers to “Book a demo” with a sales representative to schedule a live “guided demo” presentation of their software.

For completeness, we also found that 11 out of the 63 vendors offered both a free trial and a “guided demo” option.

Is a “guided demo” better than a free software trial?

Free software trials and guided demos can both be effective ways to showcase a product to potential customers and help them evaluate whether a product is a good fit for their needs.

Free trials allow potential customers to try out the software at their own pace and in their own time. It allows prospective customers to experience the software firsthand, which can be more effective than just watching a demo.

Guided demos, on the other hand, can be a good way to answer questions and address any concerns potential customers might have about the software.

Ultimately, both free software trials and guided demos can be effective tools for showcasing software to potential customers and helping them decide whether it’s suitable for their particular needs.

Do prospective customers want to see a “guided demo”?

A recent poll on Reddit, revealed that of the 444 people who voted, 300 would want to see a software demo on their first interaction with the vendor. 133 people would want to see a demo after 2-3 interactions, and 11 people wanted a demo after 4 interactions.

Looking at the poll’s comments though, many people want to evaluate software without any interaction with the vendor.

One person commented that “Sales-led demos only exist to give the sales people leverage in the interaction.”

Another commented “Software selection is a part of my job description — if I can’t see a demo without needing to put a meeting on my calendar, it’s an automatic no-go.“

Whilst another commented “Users should be able to signup for [a] free trial without having to talk to sales“.

We’re in agreement with these sentiments and feel that a “free trial” a customer can explore at their own pace is far better than “guided sales demos”.

In summary…

For prospective customers who insist on a “guided demo”, we can accommodate, however here at MIDAS we prefer to actively promote our FREE 30 day room booking system trial.

We believe that trying a fully-functional copy of our software free for 30 days yourself – with no credit card required, and with obligation to buy – is the best way to get to know our software and to explore its extensive capabilities.

…and our responsive sales team are always happy to answer any questions you have on our software before, during, or after your free trial.

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