[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)