2.0 Pricing!

I've just visited the website after a few months and have seen the announcements concerning the licensing of 2.0 standard/professionional. I'm amazed that you believe you can make a business charging more for your Grid widget than other "widget" suppliers do for an entire integrated widget set.

While I was originally planning to pay for a commercial license, I am now of plan to abandon your Grid because it's simply too expensive for a startup like mine. (And let's face it, I'm not buying a J2EE platform here ;-)

I wish you good luck and am truly sorry things worked out this way, especially since we spent a significant amount of time integrating your widget with our application.

Sincerely,

I don't see how the price increase from $299 to $395 could justify so much discussion.

Prabhu Venkatesh,

Do you not see that you ARE getting an entire widget set, not just a grid? My entire application (web replacement for a Windows application) is created using AW objects. And if you have invested a lot of time integrating this into your application, then to me it would be a no brainer to just pay the money and move forward. Calculate how much it is going to cost you to switch to a free toolkit, not only in man hours but in lost functionality. I have looked at almost all of the competitors and none of them are as fast and flexible as AW. If you really do the math, you will see that $395 is a bargain!

I think that $395 is a bargain! As Jim stated, you are getting an entire UI framework that is incredibly flexible. I too have built a decent amount of my web application UI out of this framework. You might want to investigate AW a little more before deciding the extra $96 is too much.

Alex said:
I don't see how the price increase from $299 to $395 could justify so much discussion.

Very true ... the price difference should be a non-issue to the honest developers who were going to pay the $299. There are probably many people using 1.0 who DIDN'T pay and DON'T qualify for the free version. I agree with your decision to only release a paid version.

With that said I wish you could find a solution to have a free/limited trial version. Hey, maybe that could be one that only works on FireFox since the market share is much lower. I'm afraid many people are miss out on this great control because they don't realize what they have found.

Think about this for a second.

Would you rather have maybe 100 users paying $395, or potentially tens of thousands of users paying $50 or so?

Bring the cost down and you'll make much more in the long run.

Keep the costs as they are, and many will get it from Kazaa

> potentially tens of thousands of users paying $50 or so?

:-)

Initially there was ActiveWidgets Basic license at $60 - only few people ever bought it, so this nice theory does not always work in real life.

Rob,

eventually there will be limited free trial version. I already thought of offering Firefox-only version for this purpose - technically it is the most simple solution.

For me, I currently have no clients that would need or consider a tool such as this for commercial use. My interest is strictly academic in an academic institution. That is, I need to know enough of the basic philosophy and basic use so that I can demonstrate and/or recommend this this tool. Having tried to make one of these grids a couple years ago ( suceeding only in, sort (sometimes) and scroll (some platforms) )
I know very much how really beautiful Alex's work is. This tool is amazing, if only for the GRID alone, well worth the price, if you have a commercial use or customer. Anyone who uses it for commercial purpose, without a license will surely be out of business soon.

However for those of us who, have to know tool VERY well before recommending it to our boss, I don't see why its not freely available for testing. . Making a demo, restricted or for only one browser, seems a lot of work for naught! Everyone here knows that as soon as you run any application at any site that uses this grid, you then obviously have a copy on your machine (it's not magic!)

So it seems, at best you're irritating the honest and encouraging the dishonest... by the no try policy.
It just seems counter productive...

For all who have tested earlier versions of the grid etc.. This truly is a stunning work of art, beautifully crafted, elegant code, and masterfully executed.

(please absolutely no flames in response here!!!)

thanks so much Alex!
-geoff

I agree that AW is a great product and nothing out there even comes close. The price increase is well worth the product, but I do agree with Robert in that you could make more by not offering a demo/trial and lowering the cost or offer a demo NOW and leave the cost as is.

I believe the inital shock is from noticing the sitewide pro cost which is pretty darn high considering what you are getting...I agree, we arent purchasing a Coldfusion server license or anything to that extent.

I do appreciate the product and I'm sure you have spent countless hours on developing this, but seriously consider easing the price of the sitewide licensing based on the product.

>seriously consider easing the price of the sitewide
>licensing based on the product.

Amen to that

I agree... The professional product, which is basically a version of the standard product that works across a greater number of browsers, is exhorbitant. This is not some AJAX framework that will allow us to do nifty things in an asynchronous fashion. This is a plain js/html widget that is pretty and functional but not extraordinary.

I will be surprised if there is a market for the professional product given the price tag. We would purchase a license for such a product if the price were not astronomic.

"This is not some AJAX framework that will allow us to do nifty things in an asynchronous fashion"

Actually, take a look at AW.HTTP.Request
http://activewidgets.com/aw.http.request/

AJAX routines included!

As far as pricing being astronomic, prices are for the version 2 which is a commercial product. Businesses who need this sort of toolkit, are willing to pay for that and the prices are no near astronomic. If you want a free version check out the GPL'd version 1 here

http://www.devdirect.com/ALL/activewidgetsgrid_PROD_00012746.aspx?&Show=Files

Well, I had been planning to use active widgets in an application for one of my clients, but I can't really use it unless I can show them how it will work. I can't do that if I don't have a active widgets. I see there is a FF only version, but that won't help because the client intranet is IE only. I'm actually quite annoyed now because I spent a lot of time integrating version 1 into the demo and was looking forward to version 2, but suddenly out of nowhere I can't use it anymore without shelling out $$$. Unless I can develop a significant demo with active widgets, I can't buy it. It is critical to make sure it can do what I need before I pay that much money.

Please reconsider your policy. I would love to use active widgets in my app, it is a great product and I can guarantee you would have a sale from my client, but I really need the fully function code in order to sell it.

I am torn here. I love what you have done, and would love to use it on a noprofit website to help the non-computer savy depatment leaders enter data into the website but, with no funding for the website, and only donated time on my part, I can not use your great project.

Drat. time to search the eather for an equivance.

Loved the Betas though

Yeah, frankly I'm even more concerned about paying before trying it out now that I've had a look around the site. It doesn't appear that it acutally works as advertised. Tree control is buggy, who knows what issues are still unresolved. I absolutely can't consider this product unless I can make sure it works for what I need.

And the price only includes 12 months of code updates? What is that all about? You've got to be kidding. Sure maybe if you do enough updates to warrant a new version, but bug fixes and small point releases should be included. Period.

What are you thinking Alex? You had such a good thing going...

Holy smokes, the license is totally unacceptable too. There is no way any of my clients would agree to that. Anything I created using the code would be completely worthless since neither myself nor my client would own it the rights to it. Wow.

I'm really disapointed by this, I don't know what else to say... I'm speechless. I'd expect tricky stuff like this from Microsoft, I never saw it coming here. I'm back to square one I guess I better find some alternatives quick.

I take that back, upon further review, it looks like the license is ok. The first time i read it, I thought it was saying if I create a website using activewidgets, then Alex would own it, but I think it just means if I make changes to the active widgets itself, that is what Alex owns. Thats a bit more reasonable.