I want to get excited about Wolfram and Mathematica again. All of their blog posts are rather informative great reads. But then I head over to the pricing page and am reminded of why I love open source tools.
The Wolfram Programming Cloud even has a free tier. The online IDE does not have quite as smooth an experience as the desktop IDE, however. https://programming.wolframcloud.com/
Is your CDF format ever going to be publicly specified?
I don't know about that, but more and more things can be done in CloudCDF, which is standard open web technology.
I think that for the most part, you get what you pay for. Mathematica is expensive, but it is awesome. I'm not sure that it's easy enough to use for the price point they are asking, but it's definitely better than the free options.
Wolfram Online is only $15 per month now for individuals.
If it's about "ethics", that makes sense. But if price is what prevents, say, a software dude in the bay area from trying out Mathematica, well that's just l, o, l; i, m, o.