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Comment by mkal_tsr | Hacker News Reader

> Now the complaint is we don't get Visual Studio support with indie pricing. Seriously folks?

My comment from that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7811180

So now instead of $3k out of pocket for VS support, it's only $1k. I'm sure it's a good product, but my complaint has not changed (so I'm not sure why you said 'now the complaint is' since you're replying to someone that has maintained the same complaint). I mean, if you wanna gimmie $1k so I can test out Xamarin+VS for more than 30 days, I'd totally be down, but until then, I'm merely posting on HN (since their company reads HN) that it is still cost prohibitive even though I want to give them money.

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Why do you think you need VS support. Care to expand? Just a preference or something else; I am just genuinely curious.

There are lots of good tools / plugins for VS, and its extensive debugging capabilities are awesome, plus it's my most used IDE for side projects and when I was working on pre-boot firmware. With MSFT adding in more support for things such as TypeScript, consolidating my workflow to a single IDE would be very handy. Plus, with the weight of MSFT behind it, I have more confidence they'll fix and deploy breaking issues faster than a small company trying to cover that and their own IDE.

And also lots of personal preference :-)

Edit: woah, their pricing isn't actually changed, they just removed the "per platform" from the pricing table to the sub-heading. So it's back at $3k for VS support for iOS/Android/Windows :-(

    >So it's back at $3k for VS support for iOS/Android/Windows :-(

Given the current Windows Phone app market it's probably more cost effective to skip that platform in Xamarin and just work in VS with native project types.

For most people it might be, but I'm a solo bootstrapper, so time == $^$ for me :-/

I'd really like to see a trial until release subscription option, I think that would afford a lot more people time to test and play with what Xamarin has to offer, 30 days just seems too limited to really dive into it unless you can guarantee you won't get pulled off onto other tasks/projects.

Ask them nicely to extend for another 30 days. Most companies I've asked to do this have been happy to do so.

The problem with "trial until release" is it would leave the door open to all kinds of jailbreaking/sideloading shenanigans. Sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

I heard on a podcast one of the Xamarin evangelists (don't quote me on this but I think it was James Montemango) state that if you request an extension you can get a 90 day eval. But that was before the subscription pricing plan was available so that may have changed.

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