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by untog 4936 days ago
It costs $399 for an individual license, so there is a cost barrier. I balked at the cost of MonoTouch, but since playing around with it, I've got to say- I think it'll be worth the money. I just wish it was a little more affordable to hobbyist developers like myself.

EDIT: I just noticed that they had a 25% Black Friday offer. Damn.
2 comments
natfriedman 4936 days ago
Thanks for the feedback. We definitely have two classes of customers - businesses and professional developers who can't believe how cheap our products are relative to the value they're receiving, and hobbyists who are more price-sensitive. It's tricky to balance these two.
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swalsh 4936 days ago
That makes sense, here's another idea. At my day job the price of your product is perfect. Its an enterprise app that we want to support on all 3 mobile platforms, which we sell for $5k a pop (and another $200k * N in hardware). $600 is actually cheap (though so is my company, so we probably wouldn't pay more than $1k).

On the other hand, at home I couldn't afford more then $200. When I make an app at home, its for my own fun.

Instead of trying to satisfy both situations in one model, have you considered licensing per app? Every computer I develop on has an internet connection, so i'd be okay having to connect to your server to compile. I'd even be okay with having subsets of the framework licensed separately if it means I can get it cheaper at home.

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natfriedman 4936 days ago
Some of our competitors have done this and we've received very negative feedback from their customers about per-app, per-user, and royalty-based pricing.

Also not sure it makes sense to create a price incentive to bundle a bunch of functionality into a single app.

We like having simple, fair, obvious pricing. Even if it means leaving some money on the table.

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untog 4936 days ago
Oh, I understand entirely. To a large company a $999 license is practically a rounding error given expenditures on other products out there.

I don't have any great suggestions on how you can fix it, just a lament :)

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jmcqk6 4936 days ago
What about a pricing model similar to what [ncunch](http://www.ncrunch.net/) is doing?
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WayneDB 4936 days ago
I'd love to see Xamarin grow enough to offer the dev-tools for free. Obviously that'd mean making money off of something other than dev-tool sales. I can think of lots of ways you could use Mono to break out of that market. Any plans to move in this direction?
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pretoriusB 4936 days ago
>It costs $399 for an individual license, so there is a cost barrier.

Well, being free never made Java on the Desktop go anywhere, anyway.

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