>>Hi,
>>
>>We have just started porting our main app to servoy, looks good.
>
>
>What is your main app? Why (specifically) did you ultimately choose to go Servoy?
>
>I'm having a hard time getting over their expensive runtime licensing.
>
>I would love to hear updates on your progress over the next year.

Hi Brandon. About pricing of Servoy, you might want to listen to ServoyCast #4 podcast episode, where a company who successfully migrated from VFP to Servoy also discusses the Servoy pricing. ServoyCast: http://www.screencast.com/users/Servoy/folders/ServoyCast

I also pasted below an excerpt from: January 2011 Servoy Newsletter for VFP Developers from Ken Levy
http://www.servoy.com/generic.jsp?taxonomy_id=1104

Servoy Pricing

Recently I read a tweet posted by J.D. Mullin (@jdmullin), who is the development manager at Sybase for Advantage Database Servoy (http://sybase.com/foxpro), in which he said: "Remembering today the old tidbit that Linux is only free if your time has no value. ;)". This is a meaningful comment relative to the cost of software licenses (or free software/runtimes) compared the cost of development, testing, and deployment of an application.

As an independent developer and consultant, I don't work for nor represent Servoy. And while I don't focus on technical aspects of Servoy rather than marketing/sales, I am frequently asked by VFP developers about Servoy's licensing model since it does not include a free runtime like VFP. Often when developers and business managers review pricing for developer tools, they don't include the cost of time of learning and development involved beyond just the software licensing. Servoy is not just a stand-alone developer tool/IDE, it's also a full application server. Products like Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange Server, Sybase Advantage Database Server, etc. all have runtime licenses either based on users or processors/servers. So Servoy has to be thought of as a platform, an active running server. There is a great deal of functionality that is included in the active application server that does not need to be coded in the custom application created, and the application server is evolving with many new features on a regular basis - thus evolving the applications based on the Servoy platform.

Servoy's application server is an active running platform which provides a great deal of functionality that reduces the time and cost of creating and evolving/enhancing a database application. Businesses generally save a fair amount of cost overall with Servoy, with the total cost of licensing being less than it would cost to develop with .NET or create from scratch on the Java platform or other. The Servoy platform (IDE developer tools and application server) evolves in a regular basis, much faster than Visual Studio and previous versions of VFP, and all new versions are free (no upgrade costs for new versions).

Servoy says they recognize that Servoy's widespread adoption can be widely attributed to it's out-of-the-box productivity and features, built-in SaaS support and frameworks, and hybrid deployment capability from a single code-base. They have also recently said they realize that their enterprise pricing for the Web Client has prevented some of their customers from using Servoy for smaller projects. Therefore, Servoy recently decided to change the pricing for their Web Client significantly, detailed at http://servoy.com/pricing. Servoy also comments that they are confident that this change will be very appealing to both prospective and current Servoy clients. The number of organizations using Servoy technology to create standards-based applications continues to grow rapidly each year, and this new lower pricing is expected to greatly accelerate that trend, which also helps the Servoy development community and overall ecosystem.