Juce 5 Licensing questions

Commercial / Licences
1

Hi guys,
I just read JUCE 5 announcement and I have some questions…

  1. When I subscribed back in April 2016, there was an option to upgrade to full license after 12 mandatory months. Now you don’t offer discounts any longer. I just lost $600 spent so far?

  2. AAX support only for Pro licensing… I understand that Live Coding wasn’t a good reason to purchase a Pro license instead of an Indie one, but forcing small developers to go Pro for that?

  3. What are we paying for? I mean, I know that it hasn’t released yet, but a little clue of what is changing and what we’ll get would be helpful. So far I feel like I’ll have to pay more to have basically the same I’m already using.

Now a personal note: I’m not “ranting” about the price. It’s not a problem to me to pay for a perpetual Pro license, but I have to show you my remarks. I feel like JUCE became part of ROLI we became a sort of perpetual beta testers. Since I purchased my license subscription I weren’t able to use JUCE 4.x for any of my projects, since every time there were a breaking change or something not working as expected. I understand that ROLI made a huge investment in the company and now there are a lot of priorities but, please, just tell us if developers are still your core business. I hope so, and I hope that JUCE 5 will finally bring some stability and give us the features we asked for.

Sincerely,
Luca

3 Likes
2

May I ask where you read the announcement?

Thanks,

Rail

2 Likes
3

I received an email from them, from their newsletter

4

Hmm… It’s not in my spam filter… and I have two emails registered with ROLI… Unless they’re not sending it to folks who own the JUCE 4 Pro License.

Guess I’ll have to wait 'til they reach the R’s

Cheers,

Rail

5

same for me, also want to know more…

6

We’ve sent earlier today a sneek peek to all customers, but perhaps some did not get it. @Rail_Jon_Rogut, I’ll send it to you.

1 Like
7

Thanks JB

Rail

8

Hey Luca,

Thank you for your feedback. JUCE is certainly dedicated to supporting developers, and I hope that you find the level of commitment we show here on the forum, and the daily bug fixing satisfactory.

AAX requires a stronger commitment from developers, who have to pay for a license to Avid, and it’s quite some work for us to maintain it, so we feel it’s justified to ask that Pros only get access to that feature.

With regards to your understanding that you could upgrade to a full license after 12 months, could you tell me where you saw that? The subscription was not conceived as a way to get a perpetual license after 12 months, the idea is that you benefit from upgrades as long as you keep paying a monthly fee.

I understand that you feel that we’ve been light on the announcement of the new features, we’ve not sent any e-mail announcing them, but we’ve released many of the upcoming features on the develop branch, which I invite you to check out.

If there are any features that you feel are missing, we’re listening to suggestions!

Best,
JB

1 Like
9

Hi JB,
thank you very much for your kind reply. About the upgrade, I remember that from the JUCE 4 license pricing thread last year (JUCE license pricing).

Thanks,
Luca

10

I see! So are you thinking about a cross-grade to Pro JUCE 5 perpetual?
Happy to discuss off the forum.

11

Without seeing the new features in JUCE 5 my first thought is that a 30% discount from JUCE 4 PRO perpetual to JUCE 5 PRO perpetual seems a little high if most of the features are in the Dev branch. It may make more sense to upgrade later after JUCE 5 has added more features… so what’s the time frame for upgrading?

I registered a perpetual license of JUCE 4, can I upgrade to JUCE 5?
Yes, the upgrade to JUCE 5 for owners of a perpetual JUCE 4 license is discounted by 30%. For JUCE 4 users upgrading to JUCE 5 Indie costs $490, and upgrading to JUCE 5 Pro costs $910.

Cheers,

Rail

12

The main driver of the price increase for the Pro license is that it now includes deployment on iOS and Android platforms (plus other platforms we may support in the future).

The time frame for upgrading depends on when you start using JUCE 5 code in released products. The fact that the code is on develop branch doesn’t change the fact that it is licensed under JUCE 5, not JUCE 4.

Best,
JB

13

Stronger commitment due to Avid introducing breaking changes in every new PT version? True.
Pay for a license to Avid? Not true. You don’t need to pay any fee to Avid to develop AAX anymore.

This just feels like a way to force a Pro license on small developers.

3 Likes
14

I’m sorry JB, but what does that means? If I downloaded from the dev branch few days ago I cannot use it, because is implicitly under JUCE 5?

Thanks,
Luca

15

Yes, it means that you will need a valid JUCE 5 license to use commercially the code on develop.

We’ve put the following disclaimer in the readme file that is displayed on the develop page. Pasted below.

GIT “develop” BRANCH DISCLAIMER

The source code available in the develop branch is provided for
testing purposes. JUCE offers no guarantee that the source code
will be integrated to the JUCE framework. The source code can be
used for commercial and open source releases following the terms
of the JUCE license. Many of the new features presented here will
ultimately be released as part of JUCE 5 and using them in closed
source application will require a paid license. Please contact
info@juce.com for any questions or visit the JUCE forum at
forum.juce.com.

16

Thanks for the clarification, JB. I’ll wait the details about JUCE 5, in order to better understand what develop branch features are now under JUCE 5.

17

Can you send it to me too @jb1?

18

Can you confirm that purchasing a Juce 5 license will not revoke a juce 4 pro license?

19

What do you mean by revoking?

20

Your email says that you can upgrade from Juce4 to Juce5 for a reduced price. usually when we do that, we give up the license to the lesser-versioned product. In this case, that would be the JUCE4 license we paid $999 for