Re: the BizSpark cost that most folks are talking about I've been in BizSpark for almost 3 years now (graduation date is April 2012), and hopefully I can add a

Re: the BizSpark cost that most folks are talking about I've been in BizSpark for almost 3 years now (graduation date is April 2012), and hopefully I can add a bit to the conversation. I'll caveat this with the fact that I primarily develop on a MacBook these days and my target environment for most projects is Ubuntu or Debian, in Java and Ruby. However, I still do a fair bit of .NET work, and when I signed up for BizSpark I had the intention of building some .NET products with it. The ultimate reason why I moved on (and this has actually changed since then) from that original idea was that it was a pain in the rear to find a host who would honor your BizSpark licenses. So the choice was either try and deal with that mess, or buy my own gear and run my own infrastructure. I prefer to bootstrap, so like I said, I've moved on. Anyway, on the cost of BizSpark - you get to keep all the production licenses you spin up in the 3 years or pre-1 million mark. Even if you graduate early, you get to keep, for free, all of those licenses and use the for perpetuity. On top of that, MS (at least for my account, but I'd assume others) has waived the $100 graduation "fee". That means I've gotten 4 Windows Server and SQL Standard processor licenses for free, which I can use perpetually with no cost. I can also keep all of the dev tools, etc that I was granted via BizSpark, at no cost. And with folks like Amazon now allowing you to supply your own licenses, it makes it easier to put those Windows licenses to work. I really enjoyed the .NET development I did. The platform has issues like any other, but presents a really integrated environment for just getting something together and getting it out there, and allowing for a pretty significant cost for performance ratio that is supplemented by a really nice core platform (I'm a fan of C#, in particular).