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I know developers are allergic to paying for anything but if you're a company working on a really critical app, the reality is Ionic and Capacitor offer somethi

I know developers are allergic to paying for anything but if you're a company working on a really critical app, the reality is Ionic and Capacitor offer something you just can't find in any other mobile ecosystem today: direct support and officially-supported enterprise integrations. The premium features we have are almost all enterprise-focused ones that indies and startups frankly just don't have a lot of need for or they already have community-supported options. Our approach there is to monetize things that are "must have" for enterprise but only "nice to have" for everyone else. If they are "must have" for everyone we try to make those free. And you can actually call us and get dedicated support. Can you imagine Facebook or Google ever doing that? With that revenue we are able to invest back into the OSS technology and we're also aligned with actual users of the stack. This isn't an internal project at a big tech company that we just happened to OSS for goodwill but only build for ourselves. At the end of the day our users are our #1 focus, not internal projects. Capacitor is younger than RN but the ecosystem is growing around it and I've been excited seeing more 3rd party vendors officially support Capacitor (Sentry, for ex) and the quality of the first-class Capacitor plugins has gotten a lot better this year (and we've also chipped in to help where we can). Capacitor has a huge addressable market since all web technologies work with it and I think that will help it become a pretty big force in mobile. People don't realize this but Cordova powers a lot more apps than both RN and Flutter today. There's just a ton of web devs in the world.

simonbarker87 5y ago
You come across very defensive in this post which indicates that I maybe hit a nerve (or I’m reading it wrong). Either way, your enterprise stuff looks great but you give no indication of pricing and as a dev I’m not allergic to paying for things but I am allergic to companies who don’t have an “other than enterprise” story. I would happily pay you a monthly fee to get access to plugins that are better than the community dross available but you’re not interested in my business. I think Capacitor and Ionic are great, sadly Ionic the company leave much more to be desired. I once asked a question somewhere in the forums about a good plugin for something and the response was “hey, we don’t offer that to none enterprise customers but feel free to make your own plugin and share with the community” - sure, I’ll get right on that - if I wanted to be a native dev I’d be a native dev
- yesimahuman 5y ago
  Not defensive, apologies if it came across that way. I try to explain how Ionic is different because developers often aren't thinking about some of these non-technical/support things, but their boss or team leads might be. Everything is very "free" on the client-side of mobile but that has also created a situation where teams building really important apps aren't able to get any dedicated support or guarantees around maintenance, so we're trying to fill that gap. We've made our pricing more transparent recently and have added special plans for indies and startups that qualify as well. In particular we're trying to make more of our enterprise native plugins accessible for startups: https://ionic.io/pricing https://ionic.io/pricing

simonbarker87 5y ago

You come across very defensive in this post which indicates that I maybe hit a nerve (or I’m reading it wrong). Either way, your enterprise stuff looks great but you give no indication of pricing and as a dev I’m not allergic to paying for things but I am allergic to companies who don’t have an “other than enterprise” story. I would happily pay you a monthly fee to get access to plugins that are better than the community dross available but you’re not interested in my business. I think Capacitor and Ionic are great, sadly Ionic the company leave much more to be desired. I once asked a question somewhere in the forums about a good plugin for something and the response was “hey, we don’t offer that to none enterprise customers but feel free to make your own plugin and share with the community” - sure, I’ll get right on that - if I wanted to be a native dev I’d be a native dev

yesimahuman 5y ago
Not defensive, apologies if it came across that way. I try to explain how Ionic is different because developers often aren't thinking about some of these non-technical/support things, but their boss or team leads might be. Everything is very "free" on the client-side of mobile but that has also created a situation where teams building really important apps aren't able to get any dedicated support or guarantees around maintenance, so we're trying to fill that gap. We've made our pricing more transparent recently and have added special plans for indies and startups that qualify as well. In particular we're trying to make more of our enterprise native plugins accessible for startups: https://ionic.io/pricing https://ionic.io/pricing