Friday, September 11, 2009

LiveCycle Data Services 3 - Pricing

I was poking around the Adobe Labs site and came across the Model Driven Development Getting Started Guide. This looks really, really cool. However, I couldn't find any information regarding which version of LiveCycle DS it will be part of. Given the hype about the new capabilities of Flash Building and LiveCycle, I'm sure there are many developers getting very excited about using it in real world projects. It definitely seems like it can save a lot of time.

I am anxious to download it and try it out, but before I put the time and effort into it, I would like to know if it is really feasible for the types of projects I work on and the budgets I need to work within. If there is going to be a $5000 per CPU type price tag on it, I will have a hard time justifying it to my clients.

To put my conspiracy theorist hat on for a moment, I wonder if Adobe is withholding the price until we all get "hooked." Once hooked, we may never want to go back to writing server side code which would allow them to charge us an arm and a leg.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

As it turns out, I went through the same thing about a month ago. The price is definitely justifiable if your going to be using all the features of it. It will cost you more time and money trying to put it all together with other technologies you can Frankenstein together. There's also an open source version you can find at graniteds.org.

I ended up only really needing what blazeDS offers. That's what adobe just made opensource. Plus it gave me an excuse to work with Java.

TJ Downes said...

BlazeDS is adequate for most applications unless you require true real-time messaging (via RTMP), Data Synchronization, Spring or SQL Integration, etc.

In other words, if your client is not Enterpise then chances are you dont need LCDS. LCDS is an Enterprise product for a reason :D

jtgrassie said...

I had the same problem/dilemma not too long ago. Getting a cost of LCDS out of Adobe is like squeezing blood from a stone! I still have not been told months after me querying it. The only solution is to use BlazeDS if that will do or use something like GraniteDS (open-source) or think seriously about using another technology all together.
Adobe listen: we cant sell this to our clients if we dont know how much it costs.

Rob McKeown said...

I'm glad I am not the only one wondering this. You would think with all the hype regarding the new features in FlashBuilder that rely on this, more people would be asking about this publicly.

Anonymous said...

I was quoted 20k per processor from Adobe for LiveCycle.

Unknown said...

Very similar problems here. Sent bunch of queries for pricing, but no response not even "That's a top secret, we can't tell you that".

There is another thing that does not make sense to me and that is putting new model-driven development only in LCDS. This is not enterprise technology it is technology that makes developers life easy and client doesn't care weather I used fiber and model-driver technology or I wrote thousounds of lines of code on java server.

So, I need to charge each my client technology that is helping me - and not them. Just doesn't make sense.
BlazeDS would be more than enough for all my clients, but I have to find a way to sell them LCDS because I needed it, not them.

Adobe - either pull out model-driven stuff out of LCDS and charge it seperately as developer license and make it usable with BlazeDS or get back free one-cpu license for LCDS because there is no way I can sell LCDS to my clients with high price tag. Otherwise, you might start loosing customers because people will be forced to turn to other technologies.

Mario Blataric said...

Got response for pricing for my local country.

Are you sitting and tied up?
Ok, here we go:
- per cpu price: 31.800$ (thirty one thousands and eight hundred dollars) :)
- yearly maintenance: 6.000$

In short - Microsoft, here I come :).

Unknown said...

Thanks for the information shared here. that was an interesting and informative. I had a good experience by participating in the Adobe Summit in 2009 which features the latest developments on the Adobe Flash Platform that is of utmost importance to both developers, as well as designers.. I learnt lot of new technologies in Adobe. And I am planning to attend 2010 edition as well. I found the information about the conference from adobesummit.com