Pricing

pocahontasdividends

I know it's a bit early, but I'm sure a project like this will charge post-beta, what model is planned? subscription? one-time purchase? what kind of price brackets and limitations?

Thanks!

Indigo

You're absolutely right, it’s still early days with the beta only out a week or two so far, but yes we are contemplating the best model to implement once it's ready. At this stage, we’re leaning towards a subscription model as it carries a number of very practical advantages for us as a small team, particularly for support, as well as being able to roll out important features any time rather than waiting for a new major version with a paid upgrade.

We want Indigo to both become financially viable to sustain continued development and also to see it make a difference in as many developers' day-to-day work as possible 🙂 So finding that line is a little tricky to get right, and we’re in discussions at the moment on how to shape that so that we can all benefit from the outcome.

pocahontasdividends

It's indeed (very-) hard, I've been on both sides of the blade and feel with you, but also I am shrinking the amount of subscriptions I am dependent on and would personally prefer a lifetime or at least a "1 year of updates" license version, which might sadly imply limited / no support for the "lower bracket", which in turn might mean less bugs reported - an odd cycle some projects suffer and their forums / chats become ghost-cities.

I know that macOS users generally like to pay any amount for their software necessary, but the few minority of us who that's not sustainable to, would probably change back to docker-compose if it becomes a monthly expense that's considered a luxury and beyond a subjective threshold that's noticeable on our bills.

I just hope once the metaphorical guillotine falls, that those of us that can't afford to pay e.g. $20+/month for a docker compose alternative(1), won't be alienated and have a ledge to grab onto, but I would understand the sustainability aspect from your side if you had to set the bar that high or higher.

Maybe it would also help to scale the subscription, based on services deployed / active at the same time similar to fusion 360's model, making power users pay more, while the low-use people can still make use and contribute towards the project with ideas, bugs, ..

1* Note my comparisons of compose vs indigo, aren't meant to be belittling, I love the idea of this project and as soon as there's M1 support, I'd be able to give real-life experience back to the project - it's simply about "free" vs "monthly subscription" I'm sure others can echo.

filliph

Slight necromancy to also throw my 2p worth of support in for a non-subscription based alternative. With regards to being able to deploy new features whenever, rather than holding them back, how about this:

Have two tiers; the subscription, and a small one-time fee to buy access to the latest version at that time.

Let’s say you could pay something small like $5 and get access to v1.0.x, meaning any bugfixes would be included, but any features would bump the version number to v1.1 and require another payment of $5. New versions of PHP, even if it was just 8.1.6 to 8.1.7 etc, would count as a feature under this model.
The idea there being, we could pay for what we needed / wanted, rather than being forced to pay to keep an active subscription if we just need something basic.

If that would be too much hassle, then I would implore you to follow the JetBrains model and include a perpetual fallback license for the latest major version released at the time of your subscription lapsing. In other words, if we ended our sub when v1.1.0 was released, we’d get v1.1.x updates (bugfixes), but if you added any feature whatsoever, that would be v1.2 and we’d need to renew to get access to it.

This tool - while excellent - is only a convenience. I could knuckle down and spend a day figuring out a way to get all these old PHP versions into Homebrew itself - I used to have it, before I switched to Docker - and work out the SSL cert. This tool doesn’t do anything that would be next to impossible to replicate; phpStorm’s IntelliSense is lightyears beyond what you can replicate with VSCode plugins or Sublime Text plugins, and my time tracking software has multi-currency support which is useful as I bill people in different currencies.

I pay $7 a year to WoWHead to remove ads because it’s more convenient than constantly updating my adblock filters, and I pay $2.75 a month for Raidbots Premium because it’s more convenient to run bigger simulations for my WoW character.

My point is, if none of the subscription alternatives we’ve proposed will work for you, then please remember that convenience tools can only charge convenience prices, anything more than $3 a month (when paying yearly) is going to be a pass from me, sorry.