Hacker News Reader

Comment by danjoredd | Hacker News Reader

Looks like C++ Builder is still available. Its way expensive and the licensing for community edition is very prohibitive...if you make more than 5k or you have more than 5 people on your team you need to pay up. And you practically need to sell a kidney to afford it. That sucks because this IDE looks really neat, but its def not worth the money in my opinion unless you are a larger company already

Community edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder/starter

Professional https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

View on HN

Good tools come with a price, and that applies to all industries, not just programming. The most comparable offering would be Microsoft Visual Studio: free up to 5 users for smaller companies. If you have more than 5 users, it’s $45/user/month (for the cheaper Professional edition, but it would be good enough for most). And if you’ve got >250 PCs or >$1M in annual revenue, the 5 free users do not apply.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/?tab=business

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...

Or you can just buy it for $500 (for the professional edition) and not worry about a subscription.

They have abandoned community editions - it is several years behind the pro edition, broken on high-DPI monitors, no code-completion/navigation. No plans to release a new version.

Doesn't sound like a winning strategy long-term. From other comments it sounds like they are focusing entirely on customers that are already locked in with them. Eventually though, those customers are either going to go out of business as all businesses eventually do, or they are going to have to move on to other tools eventually.

If community edition is never updated, IDK how they can expect to grow or gain new customers. Thats why Visual Studio updates their community edition so often, because that helps people get familiar with the tools and companies are more likely to adopt them.

>If community edition is never updated, IDK how they can expect to grow or gain new customers.

They don't. The business model is to milk existing customers for all they have got.

Is $500/year really the going rate for a kidney? That's like the price to rent some GPUs for an overnight training job. I think it's perfectly reasonable that Embarcadero makes their software free to use until it's helped you earn at least 10x that much revenue, on top of it being a flat rate. Most companies just divide their offerings into strictly commercial / non-commercial.

There are 4 different editions. $500/year is the cheapest of those 4 editions.

https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/cbui...

If you make 5k 500 is 1/10 of your yearly income. That is a pretty big amount, especially when you take out taxes and operating expenses. Thats why I said it isn't worth it UNTIL you are a bigger business.

Well, as a beekeeper if you wanna sell some honey you need to buy some bees first, no? You’d probably spend more money getting tools and equipment for a one-person neighborhood lawn mowing business…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com