Licensing thoughts.

Dvlp

The current commercial licensing model for Qt seems a bit cost-prohibitive for startups; especially without the option to pay monthly at a reasonable per-seat rate. Have there been any discussions about providing a commercial 'lite' license for, say, $99/mo/seat; without any included commercial 'support' hours? It seems like a model similar to that of JUCE would greatly increase (small) commercial enrollment, generally. Larger companies may require a support SLA, but tiny groups like ours don't really require it. We don't modify Qt internals, or link statically - but it might be nice to have the latter option without worrying about licensing considerations. (I believe most applications dynamically link to avoid much of that trouble)

Subscription-based platform play might be good for NOK, too.

Maybe I'm way out of my lane here - just thought I'd ask. :) I'm a huge fan of Qt and have been for years.

mrjj

Hi
There is the
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020
at €411.42/year

But yes, for many the cost is a no-go.
Its hard to say if it was much cheaper, more would
buy it. But Its very likely.

Dvlp

Very interesting - I didn't see the startup licensing section. It seems a little thin and even cheaper than what I was hoping for. It reads like an indie license and less like a startup license. 100k rev + 5 employees is super tiny, unless they are using net revenue for those figures. If its net rev and a limit of 5 seats, they should communicate that a bit better imho.

mrjj

@Dvlp
Hi
I think its max number of employees and not seats.
So yes, its very much aimed at small shops.

sierdzio

@Dvlp said in Licensing thoughts.:

100k rev

It's 250k rev, that blog post is outdated. See: https://www.qt.io/qt-for-small-business

Trigve

I would also welcome some license changes.

The small business could also be problematic. If you're eligible for small bussines, you pay $500/year. Then next year your revenue go up by $10K to $260K and now you're not eligible and the prices of license goes up 8x.

So I would welcome for example some tiered small business license (0 ... $250K = $500/year, $250K ... $500K = $1000/year, $500K... $700K = $2000/year) so if your revenue goes up your license cost would go up in some reasonable increments like 2x and not 8x as it is now.

Or maybe per platform subsciption. You would get basic platform(Windows, Linux, WebAssembly, ...) for $1000/year and for every other platform you would pay $750/year.

JonB

@Trigve
All of which can only be referred to The Qt Company, nothing anyone else (like us) can do about it. And they are probably full of suggestions from punters for what they should be charging, and likely not wishing to change....

Dvlp

@sierdzio Hey, that seems much more favorable - as our core development team is small, and a four license max is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for. (why would a nondevelopment customer service worker - or a dude in digital marketing - contribute to our 'employee' count, anyway) Max 4 seats is a good plan.

Seems like Qt should be pushing this a lot harder and farther from a marketing perspective; or perhaps this is new.

In any case - thanks for the info! It's a step, at least. Would be nice to see an automated monthly payment system for this - I understand that they are probably worried about churn but I suspect they'd see more cash if they just charged $79/mo or something. (Which would work out to more than $499/yr)

-M

SGaist

If memory serves well, there used to be a "low-cost" licence but it did not really work so they are trying this new approach.