Hi there, I am a db developer and have recently been reviewing your product. I think that Servoy is a great product so far and has a LOT of potential and application, but what would prevent me of creating solutions with this product is the fact that I find the Client Licenses to be expensive. I typically develop db’s for small - to medium size organizations, and want to utilize the web-functionality of Servoy, but the client license price makes it unfeasible to approach smal size businessses.
Development tools in my mind charge you for the tool, the upgrades - but then give it to you as a tool - and dont charge the people that use the produce you produced with the tool…
It just seams a little defeating…
In my opinion, if you really want to grow as a popular front end, servoy may want to revise its licensing policies…
and remove the client licensing.
I don’t work for Servoy and I do want the best price for the best product (not necessarily the cheapest) but Servoy is not too expensive imho. When you buy a client (priced with sliding scale based on number of licenses) you buy the client- and server license. Next to that, hopefully together with the release of 2.0 we will have an iAnywhere user license included. It is that license that you pay for too.
I too work for small- and mid sized companies but I can’t imagine that the price of a Servoy license will keep them from buying my solutions. If so my pricing is too low or my solution is not right for them…
And what web capabilities are you talking of? If you want to present your data via a web interface (other than via a java webstart client) you do that with a different tool at the moment. Having that said your client can buy one license, working with a MySQL db, PostgresSQL or whatever where you pay nothing or little for (extra) users. That way you can work a lot cheaper if that serves your purpose.
I hope these thoughts will help you a little further in your decision process. Bare in mind servoy is a great tool and (sort of) quoting Matt Petrowski
I agree with IT2BE that Servoy is definetely not too expensive. I work for larger organizations and most people there couldn’t believe the prize when I told them. In the corporate field comparable technology from IBM or other companies costs $ 50.000 or more. And here we are talking only about a development platform and not about deployment. You could even argue from that point of view that Servoy is far too cheap…
patrick:
You could even argue from that point of view that Servoy is far too cheap…
I agree - if anything - Servoy is too CHEAP! I don’t know what tool you’re currently developing in… so I don’t know how the pricing compares. BUT - remember that the license price is per CONCURRENT user - not per seat. In addition, if Servoy was to give away the client (they already give away the Servoy Server) - then how will they stay in business? Companies that use a developer tool-only pricing are either: a) have deep pockets and make their money other ways; b) out of business.
My small to medium business customers can buy a 10 or 25 user “bundle” and have all the software they need. A 25 user bundle with 2 Developers is only US $4,500 (with support/subscription), and a 5 user with 1 Developer is only US $1,650 (with 1 year support/subscription).
Thankyou for your replies, they are very educational to me..
I guess I am gonna need some more information on what typical solutions get sold for… I currently work for a private school as a teacher, and, having a Computing Science degree, am always looking for ways to technify the business / daily processes of teaching and administration… so have, up till now, created a nice FM db to take care of things, but want to port it to the web to make it more usible to others… then I got to thinking how much it would be to place my app on everyones desk at work… thats when the prices started to shoot up, and my doubt that I would beable to sell it to the director, increase.
If you have created a commercial solution before, could you kindly let me know the basics:
what was the nature of your app
what size of organization you provided it for
how many users
what was the general price you charged, and support system you set up.
Having been a professional FileMaker developer for 17 years and having sold hundreds of bundled solutions (in the thousands of dollars each) requiring customers to then go out and buy a copy of FileMaker for each workstation, I can tell you that Servoy’s licensing costs are very reasonable and that anybody who complains about the price is going to complain … about everything! The old adage 'When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys" is true here + don’t forget one of the major selling points with Servoy is zero deployment and that’s worth a lot all in itself.
Either way you get too many damn monkeys and eventually one of them, pounding away at a keyboard, is going to write such elegant code that they will put all of us hardworking developers out of business
