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Comment by boucher | Hacker News Reader

We haven't set a final price yet. We're hoping to use our beta members as a sounding board for determining the right price point.

It's worth noting that all of the stuff Atlas builds is still usable without Atlas, though there will be no way to edit it without Atlas.

Of course, most of the editing technology is also open source, so building a cib2nib (the reverse of our nib2cib) should be very possible, and give you alternatives.

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I think it looks like a really cool product; I definitely want to use it. You guys are making the right decision by charging for it for sure. My only concern is that I don't know how 280 North views pricing, so it gives me a little bit of pause.

Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how it shapes up - good luck!

I can tell you that it will be a lot more than $20, and it will be less $1000. Big range, I know.

I take it will be a one time charge, not a subscription model?

Yeah, Atlas 1.0 is a downloadable app with a one time charge. Eventually we will have an online component.

Less than $1000? For any per-seat pricing that nears $1k, Atlas needs be so much better than the current tools that it'll shoot sunshine and rainbows out of our asses while we're using it.

Investing in Atlas is making a heavy investment in technology solely provided by yourselves: Obj-J and Cappuccino. The foundation being open source may alleviate some concern there, but to do so, the open source foundation will need to be of sufficient quality and usefulness that we feel we can work without your IDE in the future.

I'm also VERY surprised that you're charging for an expiring beta. Doing so will greatly limit user exposure, and I'm pretty uncomfortable with paying for the privilege of testing your software.

You're not Apple -- developers don't need to pay for the ability to test/update their software for an upcoming OS release.

Well, it's as unlikely to cost $1000 as it is to cost $20. That being said, Atlas is completely optional. Everything built with Cappuccino to date did NOT use Atlas. And this will always be a viable option.

This beta is not intended to get large exposure. It's intended to get a group of people who we are confident will be dedicated to helping us make Atlas a better product.

You wouldn't be the first company to start with these intentions, only to eventually widen the open source/commercial split, where features never reach the open source edition. It's a possibility, however remote you might consider it, that we have to anticipate and plan for.

If the tools save time and money, we'll buy it, but we also have to consider potential lock-in costs a very real part of the price.

This beta is not intended to get large exposure. It's intended to get a group of people who we are confident will be dedicated to helping us make Atlas a better product.

If we're supposed to be helping you, it seems inappropriate to charge.

If you feel it's inappropriate, please don't pay. We feel that we're providing something that a certain group of people want at a very reasonable price. If you don't think it's a fair trade, we'd rather have you wait until the final version to re-evaluate the product. Thanks.

You're right, I don't think it's a fair trade -- I'm not going to pay money to beta test your admittedly unstable, rough-hewn software.

I'm not telling you this to be offensive. I'm doing so because it's clear you're alienating people who would both test and evangelize, and I think that's an unfortunate waste for a product I think has great potential (but is much, much too veiled in secrecy and a general lack of public information).

If you think the opinion isn't valuable, you're also just as free to ignore it as you see fit (... but given that I've contributed patches to Cappuccino in the past, I'm pretty surprised you don't think I'm in your 'target audience' just because I'm not excited to pay $20 AND test your software for free.)

boucher seems to be running into some pretty stiff resistance here, and I totally get it. That said, I opted to pay for the beta. While it probably should have been marketed as an alpha instead, it was worth much more than $20. Really, many people probably blow more than that on coffee in day. The Atlas alpha/beta appears likely to provide me with more value than an afternoon's worth of coffee, so I subscribed.

If doing that doesn't float your boat, then working with rough, buggy, pre-release software that may never love you back probably isn't going to be your thing either. Then you're out $20 and wish you'd bought the coffee. For their intended market, I think this program was priced right.

I can see charging a modest amount for a beta program. If it were totally free, you'd get sign-ups from any random person who has the slightest curiosity in the product, and any feedback you get from such folks is likely to be next to useless. By charging for the beta, even just $20, you weed out this chaff, and also your beta testers now have some sense of investment in the product and will be more likely to give you feedback you can act on.

But aren't you punishing your target audience by making them pay money, no matter the amount, so you can "weed out the chaff?" If that is their motivation, I don't like it.

Like you, I'm concerned for the future of Cappuccino. I realize that 280 North has to make rent somehow, but dividing the platform into a free software component and a commercial proprietary component necessarily gives them incentive to focus on the proprietary component more. This is the sort of thing that can prevent the platform from ever gaining critical mass among developers.

Wow. Even NEXTSTEP, the whole OS, and dev tools, was less than $1000 I think. I may be remembering the .edu pricing.

And most of the $20 to $1000 range is less than $1000 also. Please realize they haven't set a price yet, and "between $20 and $1000" was apparently a big enough range to encompass what boucher thought might be possible.

This comment deserves between 0 and 1000 upvotes.

Hah. You got more than 0 and less than 1000 from me.

Well then IMHO he should have stopped with "we haven't set a price yet". That $1000 figure leaps off the page and causes a lot of potentially unnecessary consternation.

What? Apple's development environment is essentially free (unless you count the cost of the operating system, in which case it's still a lot less than $1,000). Even if you compare this with the iPhone Developer program, it's still way overpriced.

Apple profits from its development program in many other ways. This is 280's business model.

It's impossible for something that has no price to be overpriced. But thanks for the feedback.

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