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by vbezhenar 90 days ago
From $960 + $399/year.

I think it's quite an accomplishment to survive in the modern world of free software development tools.

7 comments

The C# world also has quite a few paid libraries, especially for UI stuff.

Quite a few years ago I worked at a company using Delphi, and judging by their homepage they are still using it. A company making industrial machinery, with a tiny internal software department for the software for provisioning and maintaining the machines, as well as the control room software. Usability and development velocity is more important than looking hip, and easy access to hardware interfaces is paramount. And compared to developer salaries those license costs really aren't that bad

There are companies using Delphi-based products for long years (for a good reason, this is still great technology) so they prefer to pay.
There is still a lot of legacy software out there. I worked on something for a little bit (probably around 10 years ago).
New Delphi software is welcome!
On Microsoft, Apple, and game consoles, it is still pretty common to pay for development tools.

Also pretty common in enterprise tooling, which is the market of tools like Delphi.

The alternative is everyone getting surprised that their favourite free software development tools (only free thanks to VC money), eventually goes away.

Mostly Microsoft (inertia, you're already paying) and game consoles (expensive SDK/dev-kit licensing with NDA crap).

I see it less on Apple platforms except for published applications and niche tools.

There are many other computers out there.

You already paid for XCode via their beloved hardware margins.

What about that $99 yearly developer fee?

(Technically it is optional if you don't need to ship signed apps or submit to the app store and you don't care about the rest of Apple's developer program.)

That is on top, I guess.
Yeah, I'm surprised they haven't just made a hobbyist tier. Especially when FreePascal allows you to make UIs with Lazarus for free.
They have free community edition. Main restriction seems to be: "If you're an individual, you may use Delphi CE to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenue reaches US$5,000 per year."

So should be perfectly enough for hobbyist.

I tried it, it would not compile some of the templates it came with for me. Their QA process must be terrible.
It's cheaper to pay that than rewrite in a better language.
Better language = Ada?
Community Edition is free