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Comment by ShirsenduK | Hacker News Reader

The most usable charting solution keeps getting better.

If only it had the most "usable" pricing structure too:

http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html

One price for a "web page" that's not a "web application" and then pricing per developer? Just ridiculous. Why not add a per CPU surcharge while we're at it?

I don't even know what pricing per developer means. They should rethink this, because I know lots of people who ignore it because it doesn't make sense for their situation.

Agreed. This is a confusing and very strange way to do pricing. It shouldn't matter what the size of my team is. I should just be able to buy a license for my entire website/application.

What's the problem? Per-seat licenses are nothing new, it's how you have always bought Adobe/Microsoft/Autodesk/etc software.

Use d3 if you don't want to spend the money, it's much more powerful anyway.

The problem is that it's on a website, and the number of developers can change from day to day.

The license is not personal, so if another developer comes along he can take over without a new license.

It says "each person". I think I understand what they mean, but honestly, I'm not sure. For small teams using contractors, this is really unclear.

> Use d3 if you don't want to spend the money, it's much more powerful anyway.

I will, and that's the point. I don't see how this in any way invalidates my statements about their product

Looking closer, the "Learn More" link under Single Developer says "Allow Highcharts to be used with an unlimited number of SaaS projects, web applications, intranets, and websites for you or your customers."

Based on this, their pricing seems reasonable.

Although the "directly or indirectly" is annoying: 1 developer working on charting integration and 5 working on e.g. database administration? Need a 10 seats license.

They basically want you to pay based on team size. However, I'm not sure how this sort of licensing would be enforceable though. I know of of multiple companies who use HC for free for commercial purposes on the basis that all the charts are behind logins and feel that's ok. If they had a more straightforward pricing scheme I have no doubt most would just pony up the cash.

The other problem with per developer is maintaining compliance. So every time I hire I have to remember I need to get another licence for this on any other products I have that uses this type of stupid boxed-software model. It adds unnecessary overhead that isn't justified for such a small piece of component software. This isn't Visual Studio we are talking about here.

Honestly their pricing is the only reason I'm not using them.

It didn't seem complicated to me.

You either license a site to use it, license a team of app developers to use it in however many sites you like, or buy an OEM to ship it.

No you licence a "page" to use it. A "web application" is not covered by the licence. The single website licence is nearly useless:

> For use on a simple webpage that is not considered a web application. A web application is a website that has customer specific data or charges for its use. This requires a Developer license.

Google Charts is very usable and they look really good IMHO - and it's open source. I couldn't afford HighCharts license AND they never responded to me when we tried to email them about getting a "deal" as a startup.

https://developers.google.com/chart/

[EDIT] Changed to charts and included link

I use xcharts, It's very simple, good looking and based off of D3.js http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts/

they look nice, but do they support tool tips?

4th example demonstrates tooltips: http://tenxer.github.com/xcharts/examples/

Google charts is noticeably laggy at around 200+ data points. You can take a look here.

https://www.google.com/finance

HighCharts/Stock is magnitudes faster.

Agree. I really like their financial charts also.

Very nice. Do you know how they achieve the 1-pixel lines on the chart? I'm supposing they use SVG, like RaphaelJS. This was a little PITA for me in RaphaelJS.

AFAIK, They use SVG also.

Highcharts uses SVG and reverts to UML for older versions of IE.

you mean VML, the other vector markup language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Markup_Language

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