[danpalmer]

I have no problem with the business model, if it creates a sustainable business and means good support, then great.

However, I would prefer to be able to use the features in development (before production) without paying. The features don't really bring any value until they're in front of users, so asking for payment before this value is realised is a hard sell.

For personal projects I'm just never going to commit to a monthly payment before I put something in front of potentially paying users. For company projects justifying expenses during the experimentation phase is a hard enough problem that I'd just not bother.

Note: I'm not including support in any of this, I realise that support costs money regardless of when it happens.

I understand that the private fork makes licencing hard for this way of charging, but it would be great to see nonetheless.

[lgas]

> For company projects justifying expenses during the experimentation phase is a hard enough problem that I'd just not bother.

Seems like you're probably costing yourself a lot of money then. We make the decision to buy instead of build quite often in this phase precisely because the economics make so much sense.

[danpalmer]

On the contrary, I just wouldn't experiment with it.

Experiments get left on, subscriptions get left lying around, people leave, documentation doesn't get written for early prototypes, and so they end up costing a lot of money. $25/mo isn't a lot, but finding out 4 years later that it's still going after that week you were interested in Haskell is an expensive mistake.

In small companies the processes for getting sign off for these sorts of expenditures are often not developed enough, and so doing it is a pain for an experiment. In big companies it's easier in some ways but might come with more box ticking necessary to get it to happen, or more business justification.