Five years ago we launched CUBA Platform under an open-source license and offered a subscription for CUBA Studio. Since then, we have been listening to feedback and working hard to continually improve the product. We launched the Add-ons marketplace, moved Studio to Intellij IDEA and released Jmix – a new generation of CUBA Platform based on Spring Boot. We worked hard to improve the API and provide high quality support for the community and the work continues… Next year we will implement support for the latest version of Vaadin and offer automation of DevOps processes and cloud deployment. We hope that all these efforts and changes are appreciated and more importantly are helping you continue to build great applications for you and your clients!
One thing that has never changed over the 5 years is the Studio pricing. From day one we chose a pricing model in line with mass market tools such as IntelliJ IDEA. However, Jmix is a specialist product which as a result can never hope to achieve the same levels of market penetration as IntelliJ. At the same time, Jmix is a complex and feature rich platform that currently has a large team working on it in order to keep up a fast development pace. The reality is that ever since we launched in 2016 the license revenues have never exceeded 30% of the costs. Unfortunately, this is unsustainable, Haulmont is an independent software development house with just over 500 employees and we can’t continue to fund Jmix at current levels indefinitely.
Therefore, after thorough consideration, we have decided to introduce new pricing from December 14th 2021. The pricing will be split into 3 tiers:
-
Free tier includes all current features of the free version of Studio.
-
RAD tier includes all current features of the paid version of Studio. It is priced at $1080 per developer per year for companies and $540 for individual subscriptions.
-
Enterprise tier adds all current and upcoming commercial addons, plus BPM support in Studio. Prices are $1800 and $1440 correspondingly, with up to 20% volume discounts.
The new pricing will apply to both Jmix and CUBA Platform as we consider it different generations of the same product, so you can use any product with the same license. Full details can be found here.
We understand that this is a sharp increase, so we want to ensure comfortable transition for current customers. Of course, all subscriptions will remain active to the end of their current period without extra payments. Three-year subscriptions will be moved to one year after the current period elapses. Any customers who have purchased a commercial add-on will be upgraded to the Enterprise tier and get access to all add-ons.
All existing customers will receive transitional discounts:
- Any license purchases or extensions made before November 11th 2022 will receive 50% discount.
- Any license purchases or extensions made before November 11th 2023 will receive 25% discount.
This means that, for example, the current price of $389 p.a. will change to $540 in 2022, $820 in 2023 and $1080 thereafter. Again, these discounts will be applied automatically starting form the next payment date so no action is needed and as always, you can choose to cancel your subscription at any time.
Even with these license fee increases we still believe both Jmix and CUBA platform offer good value for money. Our research shows that the license fee is in the range of just 1-3% of an average developer’s salary. At the same time, we believe that Jmix offers over 30% productivity boost in most scenarios.
With these considerations in mind, I hope that you will agree that this is a reasonable move. The new revenue will help us maintain an effective team, keep Jmix and CUBA professionally supported and rollout many new features in the coming years. We are committed to make Jmix the best product in its space and keep growing a sustainable community around it.
Sincerely yours,
Andrey Glaschenko, Head of Platform Development, Haulmont