The following question, or some flavor of it has not been answered yet.
So how would this work if multiple developers are working on one project? Do you need a license for every one of them? Or is one license enough (assuming they won't spend a lot of time running the ProJucer)? And what about the build server?
Me also. I spent those last two days evaluating the cost of rewrite parts of my projects without JUCE. Finally not too much thanks to the FUD that never really quitted me after that ROLI was invited at the party.
For the love of Juce and Jules hard work I just want to be construcitive for a moment. Some of us have the JetBrains-fuckup in memory, just a few months ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3jl662/how_jetbrains_lost_years_of_customer_loyalty_in/) while others compare with the race to zero cost development (Unity3D, Visual Studio and other amazing free tools).
Assuming that ROLI also face a challenge with revenue (at a completely different scale than most of us) here are a few ideas for ROLI:
* Charge for specialized modules, but keep the basics at great value to everyone, to nurture adoption. For example, you should make a kick-ass DSP module and charge for it (lots of specialized DSP code is many times more expensive than JUCE). And you need to make it anyway for the Seaboard.
* Create 3 production ready boilerplate plugins (an effect, a synth, and a midi fx) and a standsalone wrapper. Then charge for QA of those projects with all popular DAWs and audio devices, for those who can afford it. QA-customers can report a problem with a boilerplate plugin and ROLI will fix it. That would be tremendously helpful and save everyone from the headaches and buying test machines/devices and audio-interfaces. You do the math.
* Establish a plugin marketplace maybe with a App Store-like royalty charge and flex the marketing muscle for all of us. As longs as a plugin is (non-exclusively) available on ROLIs marketplace, JUCE is free to license for that plugin. That would also be very helpful, and save (not prevent) plugin developers from runnning their own shops. The Seaboard software can seemlesly grab plugins from there.
* Charge for support / services / assets, rather than code.
ROLI, you are the strong one, who can carry out the those things that we can not. You do it for all of us, so that we dont have to. Thats what we want to pay for. We dont really need code editors (however smart) as long as Apple and Microsoft are still around - we need a strong arm to lift everyone.
Roli is of course free to try and sell JUCE at any price they wish but to call the cross-platform version cost at USD 1800/year an "indie" price is xxxxxx. An indie developer is just that. No venture capital, no contracting, just independent and proud to do his/her own thing. No matter the day-job.
As an Apple developer I would need two licenses. But why pay twice for the same software like the Projucer .. it doesnt run natively on iOS does it? So I get two OSX-versions, no? Especially as I have no interest in the Projucer. At the same time Apple now has AU 3.0 that builds product for both the ios and the osx app stores.
I understand Roli seeing they leave money on the table with bigger comanies that need to enclose various kind of software with their hardware. But the are ways to differentiate between those markets - 1-3 person companies, revenue cap and so on.
My interest is AAX, Ableton-integration (requires max-externals) and iPad. Only on Apple. JUCE was one of the alternatives. Going native on each target and fully utilize C++14 another. Roli helped me decide to go for latter!
I still like JUCE a lot and wish it success but I've been a C++ developer since 1989 and JUCE is not the first framework I've seen trying their luck this way.
I second every word that has been said here regarding the insane licensing model and resulting prices.
These are the things I find it most outrageus (and there are more I don't have time to explain here):
Like others here, I followed JUCE for few years, playing with it a few times, and only recently started a proper project with it (two essential parts to it, desktop + mobile), planning on getting a license in few months.
I am lucky in that I only spent about a month on mine, so I can look for alternatives, or simply forget about the idea altogether. I can't believe how frustrated I would be if I had a year's work or so and get this surprise with license costs! To me it seems the indie version should just be called "subscription based".
Subscription model only works if you get new versions (e.g. Adobe creative cloud or ms office subscription), if juce 5 will be released in 2 years (it's not a real monthly subscription you have to pay yearly subscription, it just shows price per month), then you would already pay more than professional, essentially getting the same thing. There are no gurantees.
Priority support could easily cost extra $1000 or more, but not everybody needs it, especially if working on stuff in spare time.
Projucer sounds great, but is it worth that much extra, especially at v1? Personally I would be much more productive in CLion IDE (costs $119 - excellent full featured ide), by being able to easily refactor and generate boilerplate code (not a top priority in your list thou).
If you do one thing, please change the licensing page, because as it stands it just seems deceptive (not "jucy"). When the new site went online, the first thing I checked was the get Juce page, and though $999, ok sounds reasonable, quite close to what it was (it's quite reasonable to assume that cross platform library will not suddenly charge for each platform). Only after I seen this post, I actually clicked further and found out it is actually $2997.... A minor difference.... Hopefully this was not intentional...
Overall, obviously it's your call, and if you want to target existing companies or sole devs who are 100% sure that their product will at least cover the license fees. I can't gamble $3k though unfortunately :(
Oh, and the funny side of it is that, on some other topic born after v4 release, it was being mentioned the possibility of discounted prices for ROLI boards to people purchasing a JUCE license, assuming they will be using them for development.
I am surprised: if they used the same rationale they used for the Projucer, they should've bundled one ROLI board with every JUCE license instead. Of course, that would justify a levitation of the JUCE license price some more, but you'll love it, who cares you don't even know how to play it?
I think, Juce users have been spoiled in the past, because Juce was so cheap! I think the new pricing scheme is fair (although maybe a bit expensive on the Indie-option).
Just compare with other cross platform frameworks, such as Xamarin. It has a similar pricing scheme.
Funny I was looking at Xamarin before I decided on JUCE, partly swayed by the pricing options at that time (over 18 months ago). Xamarin is cheaper than JUCE now at least for the Indie option. But JUCE is an open source project which has had a lot of input from its users. Xamarin is closed source and company led as far as I know.
Great constructive post, OBO!
I don't have the numbers, but by looking up helpful and smart participants of this forum in the past I got the impression that the vast majority of JUCE users are independent audio plugin developers.
I'm one myself and until this v4 release I strongly recommended Juce to any developer I met, most of them not being in the audio industry. I even taught a C++ introductional class two years ago using Juce.
So don't underestimate the harm your doing to one of your best advertisement channels! I'm quite sure a lot uf us won't passionately continue to recommend Juce after this massive price increase.
This is not made up by me. Read about business growth and you hear it again and again. Make the customers as happy as possible and they will advertise for you.
Please reconsider the pricing. Charge for extra services, support, specialized modules etc. like OBO suggested.
Hi there, great to hear that you are going to launch several plug-ins next year.
If you are only targetting Mac and Windows, you will need only to pay a one-off fee of USD $999 to use JUCE 4.x forever, you don't need to pay for each plugin version, you can use any version of JUCE 4.x from github, and you can make your own changes to the lib as you see fit.
Hi Darren,
One of the major changes of JUCE 4 is that we are now charging per seat. Typically, this doesn't change much for indie developers who traditionally deployed closed source apps and plug-ins on Mac, Windows and Linux. The cost of a license moved from £699 to $999 ($999, as of today exchange rate, is worth £663).
Thanks!
jb,
Previous JUCE licenses allowed the use of previous versions as well. I do not see this in the current license agreement. Are you not allowed to release something built with Juce 3 using a Juce 4 license?
It's fine to release a product built with any version of JUCE, as long as you have a JUCE 4 license. I'm not entirely sure I've understood your question though.
If you are only targetting Mac and Windows, you will need only to pay a one-off fee of USD $999 to use JUCE 4.x forever, you don't need to pay for each plugin version, you can use any version of JUCE 4.x from github, and you can make your own changes to the lib as you see fit.
Let's say I develop 5 audio plugins, and they're each being compiled for OS X and Windows into the following formats: AU, VST, AAX, AudioSuite.
Please answer these questions and PLEASE BE SPECIFIC for each question!!!!
I think the question of darrenw2112 is pretty clear:
I have a plug-in that has been built with JUCE 3 and need to release it now, with no desire to updating the JUCE code that it has been built with to version 4.
The question is: can I do so, after purchasing a license for JUCE 4?
The question arises because the current license specifically states that it is an agreement "for the JUCE 4 software and the associated media".
In no other part of the document something is told about using previous versions of the software (prior to v4). It only mentions New Releases.
With these elements, one can only conclude that it is currently NOT possible to release a commercial work based on JUCE 3 unless a license for JUCE 3 has been purchased before.
I've got an app half finished. It has taken 6 months to get this far, and will be at least 6 months more till i can release it.
My plan was to release on OSX, iOS, and Android.
seeing as how there was no notice at all of how much the new license would cost, could you guys consider selling some V3 licenses (that cover V4) to people like myself?
I would have bought the license earlier if i had known that it would end up 3 times the price!
I'm in the same boat as you, a couple of apps i've been working on for some time, that may still take a while to be finished and which were planned to be cross platform. I feel like I must now reconsidering using Juce for these at all as the cost to license the platform went up x3. For a solo developer this is a massive cost increase, and really the 'indie' platform offered is not something that will every get my money, as the last thing I want to do is pay every month and end up with nothing. Maybe ROLI could consider turning this into more of a 'payment plan' scheme (at a slightly higher end cost to cover inflation) that actually let us own something at the end of the day?
I must say that one of the most disheartening aspects is the lack of communication before the price went up, surely someone must have pointed out that there would be a lot of people waiting till their software was almost ready to go to pull the trigger on a licence who would be very much disadvantaged by the sudden change.
