[lispm]

Right, paying upwards $1000 for a hobby development tool is not common, even though there are more expensive hobbys.

LispWorks has the no-cost Personal Edition to get an impression and one can get trial licenses of the whole product.

Generally I fear that there is very little money to be made from a low-price (say: $100 - $300) Lisp implementation (the market is still small) and that few people will upgrade to a more expensive version of it (what would be the reason to do so?).

[_ph_]

The question is, how many hobbyist licenses get sold at the current price? If that number is rather large - great good for them. If it is only a couple of licenses, then they might consider options which open up the environment to a larger audience. Like people completely new to Lisp. Which later might turn it towards commercial applications.

I tried the no-cost edition, but as it couldn't run my pet project I was working on back then (memory limit), that trial lasted a few minutes and I continued to use SBCL.