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Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

There's Delphi Starter Edition, which is free for freeware / personal use projects, and 'free' for commercial apps until you've earned $1000 in total revenue. (At which point, they want you to buy a ~$2000 license. Hmm.)

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

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That's the annoying thing. Why don't these companies say you can use it for free or for cheap until you've earned 10000 in total, and then you have to buy a license that costs less. That way you could put the money aside in your calculations and it would be no problem. The DAW Reaper has this kind of licence, you only have to buy the commercial version if you make more than 20,000 USD gross revenue per year.

It's the same with commercial CommonLisps, I'd love to use one, but the pricing is ridiculous for small companies / hobby programmers. That doesn't add up, you'd have to be 100% sure that you'll earn more than X dollars with your application and you can never be sure of that.

When I tried it, it didn't allow me to use third party components in design time. And only 32bit demo compiler is distributed. (Can't be used from command line)

I think Delphi Started has same limitation as C++ Builder Starter - removed most of debugging functionality (e.g. local variables window). It may be not critical with small applications, but I would rather have "no commercial", no 3rd party components or code size limitation than crippled IDE. I've tried to switch from Turbo C++ Explorer 2006 (this was also free version) to C++ Builder 10.1 Starter and I prefer old one.

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