[solutionyogi]

What if your potential customers demanded risk free pricing? They get to use their software for free till they start seeing value. Would you agree to that? If not, why are you expecting Xamarin to do that for you?

Frankly speaking, if 400$ for a product like MonoTouch is risk for you then you probably shouldn't be developing commercial software which you sell for money.

[fryguy]

But the corollary is the guy that wants to make a silly app and give it away for free as a hobby. For instance, I wanted to make a very particular kind of timer application for playing Diablo, primarily for myself but give it away, and the $400 price point makes me not want to use monodroid for it. Of course, I'm not really Xamarin's target market per se, and given the post I made about HBO's pricing so I can understand their position. However, as someone that is in the segment of people the OP is talking about, I can sympathize.

[solutionyogi]

If you really want to make silly app, use Objective C + XCode. You still will have to pay 100$ for Apple Developer program.

What I have an objection to is the idea of 'pay if I succeed' model. Clearly the OP is not talking about a silly app given away for free. He wants to make money selling software but refuses to pay for tools which can help him create the software faster.

[fryguy]

There at least is a bit of precedent for it, given the Microsoft BizSpark program, and a couple of the game engines are significantly cheaper/free if the company's gross is less than some number. I'm not saying that Xamarin should do that, but it seems like making it cheap/free to lock in the codebase to the Xamarin development stack, and then having a point where they have to eventually pay makes sense.

(and using objective C/XCode are pretty much at the bottom of my list of things I ever want to do in my life)