You can see the same pricing scheme with all of these "batteries included" niche products, from Xojo to LispWorks. It looks like the sweetspot is around $1,500/year, sometimes lower, sometimes higher.
I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%.
In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.
I think you have a point. They should adopt a pricing strategy similar to Jetbrains where they have a non-transferable cheap individual license that can be used commercially, and a more expensive version for enterprise.
I believe many React Native, Electron and other hybrid solutions are made by people like me, who don't want to spend huge amounts of money to test an unknown piece of tech. These people also make recommendations to the companies they work for, which would actually afford to buy these licenses.
Why not think of a "discount" as part of the marketing budget? How much money do they spend on marketing and sales to get new customers? They will get new developers who will improve the branding and gain new "leads" organically.
If they lowered the price they would likely sell a boatload of licenses, because the RAD even 10 years ago was already more advanced than anything existing now.
The problem might be that they can't or don't want to set up an infrastructure to offer support to that many developers and companies using it, so they rather squeeze as much money as they can to the few companies buying it because they're forced to in order to maintain older projects.
It's a sad reality in which new programmers are discouraged to try a product that is likely better than anything else.
What you are describing _was_ the borland model back in early 1990s. But then they flipped to this high price model in the late 1990s when they changed their name to Inprise.
Borland was awesome, with Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Borland C++ and later Delphi they ran circles around their competitors, Microsoft included. It is incredible how they have disappeared from the scene completely.
Things like Matlab and Mathematica end up in the $2k to $3k for commercial business, but just a few hundred for hobbyists.
I've been playing with a batteries included (like kitchen sink, but still tiny) Forth language (pretty rare as most Forths are focused on embedded) called 8th that is dirt cheap for a professional edition. I think it has a good price model as it is exactly what I'd be comfortable paying for something niche.
I am not sure that this is fair to LispWorks. I think that I initially paid $3000 for a license and the yearly maintenance fee is about $500. Their support is amazingly good and CAPI is good for UI development.
Still, this is just out of range for most non-professionals. Several times I have considered to buy a LispWorks license for personal usage, but couldn't quite justify the costs.
I am pretty sure they might even sell more professional licenses if they had a wider userbase of enthusiast users.
For anyone curious, a hobbyist license for LispWorks is $500 for a 32-bit version that works on a single operating system, then $250 every year after that. If you actually want to release software other people can use, then it's $1000 and $500 every year after that. If you want to sell software other people can use, double that. Want the ability to use a database? Double it again! Oh, and if you want to release anything but 32-bit software? Double that, too.
All of this is per-seat, too.
It's really "Our company and or university gives us enough money to blow on software that we don't have to look at the prices"-oriented pricing.
LispWorks is amazing software from a development standpoint (though SBCL is significantly faster if you're actually using what you write), but it's also one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.
> one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.
Your conclusion is completely wrong. From what I see, LispWorks is making just barely the minimum to make their operation work. I wouldn't classify this as predatory. They're just trying to make enough money to survive on an environment where very few people are willing to pay for software. From what I see, most people using Lisp are hobbyists, and they already use open source products. To survive, LispWorks had to search for companies that wanted/need to pay for a supported version of Lisp.
Now, Microsoft using proprietary software to lock customers, that is predatory.
I don't think the license prices for professionals are too high, but I think there should be affordable license options for non-commercial uses. This could not only generate additional direct revenue but also might increase the number of professional users from enthusiasts who turn professional.
In my opinion, Jetbrains has the better model.
After all, what happened to JBuilder? Nobody is using it anymore, Codegear/Embarcadero priced themselves out of the competition.
Eclipse was free, Netbeans was free, JDeveloper was free, IntelliJ could be had for around 500 bucks and asking price for JBuilder was 4000 or more.
Jetbrains proved that you can successfully can compete against free. But the pricing needs to be reasonable.
Jetbrains seem to be able to compete because they are building for the mass market. JBuilder is an exception. Delphi is a niche product still strongest for fast desktop app development which has a small market compared Rider (C#), PyCharm (Python), IntelliJ (Java), etc. which are all much larger markets.
The pricing was intentional which is different from saying someone "priced themselves out of a market" (which I take to be an unintentional act). They (wrongly) intentionally targeted both an enterprise and niche desktop development segment of the market who are not building mass market apps and could never escape from there because the value of Delphi diminished when Java, and especially C# became mainstream in the early 2000s.
This mistake has more complexity to it when you understand what what going on around Borland and the market in the late 90s. If you are looking at it now, then it just seems like an obvious unforced error.
I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%.
In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.