>I agree that 700 is OK for 60 controls. But I only need a handful of them.

The problem is it's hard to sell only a few controls.

Every sale has a fixed priced component that covers installation, legal stuff, support, bandwidth, office, employees, and much more. The cost for that doesn't depend on the number of controls sold, but on the number of transactions. Let's say this is something like$50- $100 for dbi.

Assuming they have an updated package. With the few controls and the transaction cost you easily reach $149 for an updated package. What would the reaction be? They've given them away for free and now they charge a fortune for controls that are hardly improved! Maybe the new version would make it into some "free runtime package" for other VFP developers to download. To prevent this dbi would have to change the license code they use. Now you end up with lots of support calls because some customers are using the old controls, some are using the new controls, but the old controls don't understand the license code anymore.

OK, different approach. Instead of selling a suite of 60 controls for $700 lets sell them individually for $15 maybe requiring a minimum purchase of six controls to cover at least some fixed fees. Sounds compelling, right? ProLib did something like this ten years ago. Instead of selling a component library, all components where available individually. The two most common questions were: Why do I have to pay so much for this simple component? How much is it when I buy all components together? In a company you don't get a budget to buy individual controls. You apply for purchasing a full library and after that you better don't ask for something else for a while. With components, though, you tend to discover later that you can make use of some other components, too. or that one component requires another one for some feature (say tooltips with the dbi controls).