Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

Livecode's pricing is insane.

Well, to each their own, but I find the starter plan with a single platform deployment at 7.99 per month pretty OK.

I must say that I see a lot of value in LiveCode. I have a standard plan with lots of deployment options, enabling me to ship software for macOS, Linux, Windows, Android and iOS. It is not cheap, but I'm OK with it as I use it for professional work. LiveCode is a small company and making money on niche software development languages is quite hard. Sometimes selling cheap licenses is not a good option when your market is quite small.

It seems they had a GPL version, however they recently discontinued it; a fork of this IIUC seems to be now maintained by a community at: https://github.com/OpenXTalk-org/OpenXTalk-Community-DPE

Compared to what products supporting so many platforms with a commercial quality IDE, and regular updates?

Can you find even a single competitor?

Who cares about competitors when you barely have any market share for yourself? You can be the greatest IDE in the world, but if barely anybody is using you how great are you really?

The fact that their lowest pricing tier ties the apps to the account is bonkers too. If that account lapses in payment, any apps built by the account cease functioning. Not even Apple is that brazen if your developer account lapses.

That is because that account is for learning and building stuff for your own usage. If your objective is to ship software, you're supposed to go with a standard license. Apps built with them don't have such checks in place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com