Widget 2.0 Pricing

Hi Alex,

Can you possibly supply any info regarding commercial license pricing of version 2 of the Activewidgets grid?
Is it going to be similar to the current pricing model?

Thanks in advance.
Version 2 is looking really good so far. :-)

Is alpha testing for 2.0 still on track to go to beta at the end of the month?

Yes, it looks ok to start beta next week.

The (preliminary) pricing for version 2.0:

- standard edition (IE, FF): $395 per developer
- professional edition (IE, FF, Safari, Opera): $1850 per developer

free upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 standard.
12 months of code updates subscription included.
additional 12 months subscription costs 50% of license price.

Seems a bit pricy on the pro version is that a site license?

Any chance you'd consider just selling the grid as a separate product without the additional controls? Professional competitors in the ASP.net space, with components that are similar (though not as good in my opinion) usually are $799-999 for a suite of components.

You can get a MSDN subscription for that .......

Any thought to small business pricing? We'd love to use AW 2.0, but $1800 is just out of our reach. I think you might find a similar story for other small businesses and developers.

Is there still going to be a GPL release of 2.0? And if so will it be the standard version or the professional version that is released for the open sourcers to use.

I bet it will only be the standard

No, there will be no GPL or any other free license:

http://www.activewidgets.com/javascript.forum.7409.1/widget-2-0-free-version.html

The Professional edition will be necessary only when you have to support Safari and/or Opera. Everything else between standard and professional editions is the same:

http://www.activewidgets.com/javascript.forum.7364.3/version-2-0-standard-edition.html

So I guess for 99% of the people the price will be $395 which is not exceptionally high.

Public beta should start next week.

I am going to maintain version 1.0 for at least 12 months after 2.0 release. The latest commercial 1.0.x variant will be available with any 2.0 purchase and during subscription period. I will be also releasing the same 1.0.x code under GPL as before.

If I purchase the single-developer's, 1.x commercial license ($299), will I receive a free upgrade for the v2.0 release? I assume this will be the Standard edition.

Has there been an answer yet to the site licensing question?

Steve,
yes, if you purchase 1.x license you will receive free upgrade to v2.0 standard edition.

Justin,
I cannot say yet what will be the exact prices for site licenses. The prices above are for single developer.

single developer ..... jeeze that would cost my company $5550 to licence

there is no way they would spend that much on a grid if it was a dev enviroment yes but not for a component

If you really need full cross-browser support - I believe thats the right price. If not - the 'standard edition' is a lot cheaper.

What if we integrate 2.0 in open source product and point to users that they need to buy a license from active widget to use our product. What license must they buy?

$1500 to support Safari? What a rip. Does anyone know of a decent grid for ALL browsers that a one man development shop can buy reasonably?

Wow,

These prices are scary. I think some of us should start an open source project offering a datagrid, the rest of the stuff isn't that difficult.

For $1500 you could buy coldfusion or Flex builder which have flash datagrids which are truely cross browser compatiable, just need the flash player.

Even the $395 is too expensive. This should be IMHO a $99 product, it's a simple component and if not careful will price himself out of contention.

Well IMHO this is realy to expensive.

There are other projects coming up fast (like qooxdoo and others) which eventually will cover the features of the AW widget set and are published under the LGPL or other license modells.

The market will solve this by itself. If there are enough people paying these prices then there are no needs for AW to lower the price.

If not, I'm sure AW will disapear from the screens.

To Feeling Ripped Off: I have looked for two years and found nothing. I wrote my own grid that worked well but was very slow compared to AW. My company loves the grid and so do our clients so the money is not a problem.

To Dietrich: You are right, there might be other projects "coming up" but my company had to have something last year so we choose AW and we are happy we did. And you are right that the market will tell if the price is too high. But I think with the quality of work that I have seen so far, the toolkit isn't going to go away any time soon.

I agree with Dietrich. The market ultimately decides. Competition is out there.

http://www.openrico.org/rico/livegrid.page

Does not support horizontal scrolling, does not look as nice, performs better (loads very fast and supports an unlimited number of records), documentation not as good (humm), but is open source.

unfortunately for me I need IE, FF & Safari AW support - and while I've been prototyping my apps using 2.0 beta2 (and it works within reason) there's just no way I can justify billing $1850 to a non-profit client for a grid module ($400 sure... but 1850 for IE,FF + safari grid support... nope... I can't do that) - I knew the pricing model in august when I first started playing with AW so I can't say I'm surprised, but part of me hoped it would change over time - so while I'll keep playing with AWv2, it can't be a part of any production app I produce - it's a shame, I really like AW and appreciate the development effort...

on the comercial side the component below is the best I have found compared with this as jim hunter says there isn't a lot available that are top notch

http://www.componentart.com/Grid/default.aspx

They do support all browsers though and it costs more than the standard AW licence but it is only ASP.NET and if you take into account there full package of components (which aw does comes with most the same) then the price goes up a lot

Just a couple of words regarding pricing…

I don’t think it is fare comparing AW with server-side controls (like ASP.NET or JSP/JSF). It is a different ‘animal’ and solves different kind of problems. Its like someone who was going to buy a family car comes to a helicopter shop and complains that this thing is totally basic but costs more than a Ferrari across the road. Well, yes, this is a ‘cheapest helicopter in town’ but it actually can fly… (and BTW, it requires different kind of driving license :-)

So if you compare AW with the similar products, i.e. client-side (AJAX) toolkits – it is a very different story. The ‘normal’ prices here are in 20k-100k range high end (Tibco, JackBe) and 5k-20k low end (Backbase, Isomorphic) with the only exception (Bindows) below 1000$ per developer license. So in fact AW is a lot cheaper than any other product in the same category.

Now, if you don’t really need a helicopter – it can still take you from point A to point B a lot faster than Ferrari (especially in peak hours) and our mission is to build ‘first affordable helicopter’ ( maybe like this guy - http://spacex.com/aboutus.php :-)

So should you buy AW if you just need ASP.NET or JSP/JSF component - I don’t know. It has different features, different price tag, requires different skills and brings different problems. So it is up to you, but we have a lot of customers on v1.0 and some even say that AW is ridiculously cheap for what it does for them.

Another remark is regarding impact of open source on pricing. In my view the availability of open source toolkits may soon push prices up for the commercial solutions because they would have less users and they would be forced to differentiate on quality rather than on price (and project the ‘image of quality’ through the price tag). So the price pressure from open source might be in different direction than most people think.

I wasn't comparing technologies I was just trying to say that there isn't many decent grids out there like aw. The price for the standard grid is a correct price for a grid component and that is why I evaluated and bought a license :)

I do also have a license for the other component but that is because I am using asp.net in that enviroment and makes the best RAD to use that. But I use AW with all my perl based stuff. Always best to use the correct tool for the job @ hand I always think regardless of cost (that comes last)

The added value of AW can be obtain by difference between the savings you can make with it - reduction of development load and delay - and its cost. Applied to my case, it is just ridiculously priced.

For AlexWidget (sorry Active Widget) it has to be at least the development cost divided by the expected number of sells, IE market does not require features necessary for the opera market, in addition the opera market is smaller so the price is higher, fair enough.

Excuse my ignorance on the subject of licensing, but could you clarify what you mean by $395 per developer.

I am a single developer, so I pay $395 . . . right.

I then develop 3 different web-based application using AW and sell each application to 5 clients (i.e. I have sold 15 applications in total) which they install on their intranet.

So . . . I have 3 clients with 15 applications installed on 3 (internal) web servers.

Do I have to pay anything else besides the $395 or am I entitled to sell the 15 applications to my 3 clients without infringing any licensing agreement?

Rick,

per developer means you as a single developer pay $395 once off and after that you are entitled to use the library in all your projects (for any number of clients, servers, end-users or applications - as long as you are the only person who does the development work with the library). Each additional developer (but not end-user) needs additional $395 license.

And please don't forget that anyone who bought a license for AW 1.0 is entitled to a free upgrade to AW 2.0 (standard edition), so you can get a developer license now for just $299 or site license for $1499.

:-)

http://www.activewidgets.com/licenses/

:-)))

the site license upgrades you to standard for free- but I need the strict support of 2.0 (So that means i would need professional, right?) How does that work with the upgrade process?

$299 is too expensive, and $395 is even worst especially for freelancers like me, but this is business. :c(

And since there will be no plans for a 2.0 GPL release, I'll be sticking to 1.0 GPL release for now. I hope it will still be maintained and updated by Alex if ever there will still be a bug discovered from it in the future. I think the column resize patch for Firefox is still not applied for bug fix 1.0.1 so I hope there will still be an update for it, like bug fix 1.0.2 GPL release.

This is a great product. But the cost is prohibitory.

If any of you use PHP, consider using Structures_DataGrid


http://pear.php.net/package/Structures_DataGrid

It is absolutely free and better from an OO Design perspective given that you can just send it a

DB_DataObject

There are somethings Activewidgets does that the Structures_DataGrid doesn't, but with HTML_Ajax coming on with aggressive development, I think it will catch up.

At last a 1.0.2 GPL maintenance is released. I hope the maintenance will still continue in the future.

<a href="http://www.activewidgets.com/javascript.forum.9654.1/maintenance-release-1-0-2.html">/javascript.forum.9654.1/maintenance-release-1-0-2.html</a>

We've purchased a commercial license to ActiveWidgets and I can not complain about the changes to the pricing model. (We currently plan on purchasing an upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 Professional)

Wether you are a software development shop (OSS or for-profit), developer or freelancer and you or your customer is going to use this technology to make money, then pay for it. I can't understand someone charging a customer for a 10,000$ web application (very low end application) and not be willing to spend 395$ to use this control. If you think you can spend 4 hours at 100$/hr writing a better asynchronous control set, then do it.

If you feel that the 1,500$ price difference between the Standard and Pro version in order to support Safari, Opera and Strict is not "worth it", then don't pay it. You obviously don't have enough of a business need to support those platforms and additional feature sets no matter what you say. If the business is hurting, it will pay for it. We are not talking about extortion here, this is plain logic.

In any scenario you can always give your customer the choice. Spend 40 hours developing a custom control for them at a cost of 4,000$ or spend 1 minute at a cost of 1,800$ and it's all done and tested.

For the OSS community, it is too bad that there won't be a GPL version.

It really comes down to two things:
1. If you are going to make money from using the grid, pay for it.
2. Do you really want to maintain it? How much is that going to cost your business?


Keep up the great work Alex.