VS only licence
Up to now I coul ddevelop everything in Visual Studio. With the new licence-model it just became to expensive.
Actually I do not need XamarinStudio/Email Support/Any other business feature.
The only thing I need is the Visual Studio plugin :-)
Stefan
shared this idea
17 comments
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Matt McAnelly
commented
I agree with Sebastien's comment.. $1000 initially with a $200 renewal per platform is about the highest price point that's comfortable for me as an indie developer. Anything more than $300 per platform annually needs to provide more than convenience. I'm with Jashan Chittesh, in that I simply don't need the extra support provided with the business package.
While I do think Xamarin studio is a great offering, I personally feel if you intend to make visual studio integration an option at all, you should open that up to Indie developers. It's not as if most Professional Indie C# developers don't have a visual studio license. At $500 every two years the pro package is quite affordable. How can any Indie justify paying 4-12 times that amount for the convenience of visual studio integration though.
I'm completely behind Xamarin and the work they do with mono. I want to support that effort, however holding my IDE of choice essentially hostage leaves an awfully bad taste in my mouth.
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Sébastien D'Errico
commented
I am a freelancer and I am really interested about this product but I am shocked to know it will cost me more to renew a Xamarin license than my MSDN license.
I expected to pay the indie license. But 1,000$ for Android and an extra 1,000$ for iOS yearly is steep.
At worst, may I suggest to keep the 1,000$ but lower the renewal fee at 20% (200$) for the following years?
Thank you
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Wiyono Aten
commented
Oh no. This is not gonna make people adopting Xamarin for cross-platform dev. Free Starter edition is too restrictive. Indie edition is £250 yet without VS support! IMHO, VS support should be a no brainer for any license/edition - why diverge .NET dev away into 2 separate IDE camps??
Why bother with this challenge when you've really got other competitions to deal and focus with ie. PhoneGap, Titanium etc. Yes, enterprises can afford these licenses, but to compete with those HTML-based solutions or even native (for platform specific dev), ie. to rule the world, you gotta be joking! You must do a bottom-up approach for the adoption - indie and hobbyist devs are your seeds here and the way I see it, this isn't gonna make them have a look. I for one, am seriously rethinking now whether to continue. Please rethink!
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Alec Rodden
commented
It doesn't matter how great a product Xamarin Studio is, Visual Studio is and forever will be the more mature IDE by virtue of being older. Individual developers that already use Visual Studio at home thanks to their employers deserve to use a great product like this without having to take what they could easily perceive as a step down in their development tools.
This is a glaring flaw in the Xamarin pricing scheme and can only serve as a con for anyone comparing the various multiplatform mobile application solutions.
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Dan
commented
I agree, Visual Studio support should be in the Indie license.
My trial just expired, I went to upgrade to Indie and was shocked to see VS not included, I will have to think this over!
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RawToast
commented
At the moment I simply don't see the benefits of the Indie license, so I am avoiding it until I hit the limits. If the Indie license enabled VS support I would have already handed over the £200...
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Jashan Chittesh
commented
I was actually just about to start developing an app with Xamarin when I found out that developing for Android, iOS and Mac using Visual Studio will cost $2697,30 ... plus it says "annual pricing".
That was quite a downer ... it's just not gonna happen, sorry.
The Indie plan sounds reasonable - but I'm using Visual Studio for all my projects, so using Xamarin Studio is just as much not going to happen as me paying $2697,30 ... annually!?
Same here, btw: I don't need the "business features", and I don't need "Email support". And I'm definitely not planning to require "Code Troubleshooting" (At Extra Cost).
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AdminXamarin
(Admin, Xamarin)
commented
@Michal Dobrodenka
Best not to conflate issues. This sounds like an activation bug. If you're having issues keeping a working configuration activated for both android and wp8 development, we should fix it. You can find your support contact info in your account - https://store.xamarin.com/account/my/subscription -
liviu
commented
Hi,
What is indeed funny, is that i would expect to pay less for Visual studio Integration and more for Xamarin Studio. At least it was less work to develop an addin for another IDE than develop a OSX tool.
I also would love to have a Visual studio version without any email and phone support and with a smaller price... -
Michal Dobrodenka commented
@Stefan
This is a problematic cooperation: Visual Studio, WP8 & Xamarin Android development. Since Wp8 requires VS2012, W8 & Hyper-V for emulator, every time when you enable/disable Hyper-V for Wp8 emulator it will change somehow your machine footprint and your Xamarin.Android installation will must be registered again. But you can "recycle" your machine only 3 times per year. Disabling Hyper-V is required if you want to run Android x86 emulators using VT tech. (if you want usable android emulators:) )
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Stuart Lodge
commented
Thanks for the personal note, @EShy
> it still looks like a bargain to me.
It's uservoice - if that's how you feel, please open up a new request for higher prices :)
Stuart
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EShy
commented
Stuart,
While I understand that this jump in cost seems high, it still looks like a bargain to me.
I compare the cost of using Xamarin to the cost of having more developers that specialize in ios and Android and the cost of maintaining two platforms instead of one.
With Xamarin, the same devs can build for both platforms as well WP, Win8. The overall savings are big.
While keeping the previous price point of 400$ with VS support and calling that the indie package would be great, having Xamarin actually make money so they can continue to improve the tools
the best thing would've been for Microsoft to do a deal where bizspark/msdn members can get the tools for a discount
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Stuart Lodge
commented
So much of the recent Xamarin 2.0 price changes seem focussed on the Enterprise.
However, the majority of my customers aren't big Enterprise - I do have some really big Enterprise users of MvvmCross, but I don't have any who pay me money - they seem to like free instead!
My customers are typically small or medium companies. They often have only a few developers. They almost always come from MS backgrounds. They're often startups, they're sometimes pre-startups. They're the same type of customer I've previously offered Visual Studio with MonoDroid and VSMonoTouch plugged in.
Since Xam2.0, however, I've had some 'aggressive' negative push back from a couple of prospective customers, especially about the cost of development using the new 'Business' focus from Xamarin.
To give you an idea of the numbers behind this pushback, my customers were previously getting VS2012 either through schemes like BizSpark or through normal 'Professional' level licensing - so their costs per developer were:
- VS2012 - either free (BizSpark) or approx GBP400 for Pro level
- Resharper - GBP 100
- MonoDroid - GBP 250
- MonoTouch - GBP 250After the upgrade, these same customers are looking at pricing like:
- VS2012 - either free (BizSpark) or approx GBP400 for Pro level
- Resharper - GBP 100
- MonoDroid - GBP 700
- MonoTouch - GBP 700So, for a BizSpark customer with 3 developers, this means that the previous level of annual tooling investment GBP1800 has now risen to GBP4500. I know this isn't big money - it's less than a man-month of work. But the background to this is that these are small companies where getting cash is hard work, and this is in a market where other tools and approaches are often free or to start at GBP10 per month.
It's no wonder these SMEs and startups are pushing back at me with questions about tools like PhoneGap, Titanium and CodeNameOne :/ Don't worry - I fight my corner on features and total cost of development, rather than just purchase price... and Titanium's pricing model gives me lots of room to win any fight, but I'd still rather avoid the fight if I can.
Note> Yes, understand that these developers don't have to use Visual Studio and Resharper - they can use mixed VS/Xamarin Studio environments instead.
Note> Yes, I understand that there is an angle where you can argue that some of your customers are better off under the new pricing - but that doesn't help the customers I'm talking to who are definitely telling me they are worse off.
I do love the work you have done turning MonoDevelop into XamStudio, and I do have high hopes that in the near future it might be more my home than VS is. But 'Mixed VS/XS development' isn't the workflow that I think is awesome today - I think the VS-based Cross-Platform code with a high percentage of shared PCL code is awesome - and that's what most of my customers are asking me about. I also completely understand this is my dream, not necessarily your's.
Is there any chance we can get a rethink on pricing for these SME and startup customers?
Thanks
Stuart
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Brandon Stirnaman
commented
Hook up with MS and provide it for BizSpark members who buy indie licenses imo.
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Stefan
commented
@Joseph Hill:
For sure, Xamarin Studio is a nice tool.
But Visual Studio has some advantages:
- I can use R#
- I can do refactorings over all platforms
- I can develop WP8 apps
- I can develop WinRT-Stuff
- It is my well known IDEActually up to now we used VsMonoTouch to support building apps. With this I could at least build all my stuff in VS :-)
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AdminJoseph Hill
(Admin, Xamarin)
commented
Have you tried Xamarin Studio? It's our preferred development environment for all customers, and until recently was the only IDE for iOS development with C#.
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Jeff Johnson
commented
I second this. 1000 USD is just too much for an Indie Dev to get started. Please move the Visual Studio support into the 299 USD package.
