5 ms·

If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you. In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that mone

by voidr 12y ago

If you are building a commercial product and 590$ is too expensive, I feel sorry for you. In western countries you could get at most 2-3 man days for that money, I highly doubt that even the best coder could implement Highcharts in 3 days and provide support for it afterwards. If all you want is one or two simple charts then I agree, it is a waste of money to buy something like Highcharts, but if you really need most of what it has to offer then it is a good investment. I have integrated Highcharts into a commercial project and it was a success.

rtfeldman 12y ago
The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it. Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licensing terms by having more developers work on it than you paid for and (trivially) concealing that from them, (B) paying $1,500 instead of $590 (!) just so more people can legally work on it, and not even getting support, or (C) micromanaging your team such that literally only one human being can actually work on that part of the code base... ...makes for a real bad customer experience, which is surely to the detriment of sales.
- ryanackley 12y ago
  As a freelancer, I disagree that the pricing is obnoxious, it seems like a fairly typical business model for programming components. I view the 1 developer licenses as more of a discounted version for one-man shops like myself.
- btouellette 12y ago
  If you were going to violate their license you just wouldn't pay for it at all. It's free for academic and noncommercial use and you can download the complete library right from their site. Corporate environments tend to have tools to manage seat-based licensing and smaller companies only have a handful of developers anyway. Typically the number of developers who need to be working with a specific tool is known when you start the project you're buying a license for and upgrading your license isn't exactly tough. I convinced my boss to buy our department a 5 seat license for Highcharts (without support) after doing a pretty exhaustive search for free alternatives with all the features we need and it has been great so far.
- TorsteinHonsi 12y ago
  Of course there are steps between (A) and (B) - you can choose to purchase two or three Single Dev licenses. If you need four Single Dev licenses, you are better off buying the 5 dev package.
otikik 12y ago
As a reference, I was able to move away from Highcharts and into one OOS library (rickshaw) in 2 man-days; I didn't have to reimplement it from scratch, I just had to find another lib. To be fair, our charting requirements where not very complex.
Hansi 12y ago
Can't understand why people would downvote this, Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product that would require extensive charting and the gained productivity and savings in development time are incredible. Two years ago I migrated a ExtJS web app that had taken 2 years to build to Highcharts + Bootstrap in about a month or two. What amazed me was that for every ExtJS charting extension that had to be written on top of the existing facilities to create more complicated graphs there was a built in option for it in Highcharts or a simple extension in the community forums.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  > Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product Yes but Highcharts is extremely expensive compared to other alternatives which are free. Unless you're in the .NET world, no one really pays for libraries and frameworks anymore since the open source alternative is either better or just good enough.
  - dmethvin 12y ago
    At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour. I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh these things objectively. It's like going directly to a surgeon with an ailment and asking their recommended course of action. Their expertise is surgery, so their resolution is more likely to involve a knife.
    - chaostheory 12y ago
      > Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.
deleted 12y ago
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chaostheory 12y ago
1) As I've already said, High Charts isn't that much better than the free alternatives. 2) If you're bootstrapping, every penny counts. 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough.
- jasonlotito 12y ago
  > 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html > 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough. Not many, sure. But then again, they aren't going for lots of smaller people, but instead, fewer large companies. This is smart, since they are pushing support services as well.
  - ashwin_kumar 12y ago
    >> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). >Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html OEM licence costs more than $1500.
deleted 12y ago
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by voidr 12y ago

rtfeldman 12y ago

The pricing policy is more obnoxious than the price itself. $390 (or $590 for "maintenance and support") gets you the ability for one single developer to do any kind of work with it. The next tier is $1,500 (or $2,250 for "maintenance and support") and gets you the ability for up to 5 developers to do any kind of work with it. Having to pick between (A) sneaking around behind your vendor's back to violate their licensing terms by having more developers work on it than you paid for and (trivially) concealing that from them, (B) paying $1,500 instead of $590 (!) just so more people can legally work on it, and not even getting support, or (C) micromanaging your team such that literally only one human being can actually work on that part of the code base... ...makes for a real bad customer experience, which is surely to the detriment of sales.

ryanackley 12y ago
As a freelancer, I disagree that the pricing is obnoxious, it seems like a fairly typical business model for programming components. I view the 1 developer licenses as more of a discounted version for one-man shops like myself.
btouellette 12y ago
If you were going to violate their license you just wouldn't pay for it at all. It's free for academic and noncommercial use and you can download the complete library right from their site. Corporate environments tend to have tools to manage seat-based licensing and smaller companies only have a handful of developers anyway. Typically the number of developers who need to be working with a specific tool is known when you start the project you're buying a license for and upgrading your license isn't exactly tough. I convinced my boss to buy our department a 5 seat license for Highcharts (without support) after doing a pretty exhaustive search for free alternatives with all the features we need and it has been great so far.
TorsteinHonsi 12y ago
Of course there are steps between (A) and (B) - you can choose to purchase two or three Single Dev licenses. If you need four Single Dev licenses, you are better off buying the 5 dev package.

otikik 12y ago

As a reference, I was able to move away from Highcharts and into one OOS library (rickshaw) in 2 man-days; I didn't have to reimplement it from scratch, I just had to find another lib. To be fair, our charting requirements where not very complex.

Hansi 12y ago

Can't understand why people would downvote this, Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product that would require extensive charting and the gained productivity and savings in development time are incredible. Two years ago I migrated a ExtJS web app that had taken 2 years to build to Highcharts + Bootstrap in about a month or two. What amazed me was that for every ExtJS charting extension that had to be written on top of the existing facilities to create more complicated graphs there was a built in option for it in Highcharts or a simple extension in the community forums.

chaostheory 12y ago
> Highcharts is extremely inexpensive compared to the other costs that go into a commercial product Yes but Highcharts is extremely expensive compared to other alternatives which are free. Unless you're in the .NET world, no one really pays for libraries and frameworks anymore since the open source alternative is either better or just good enough.
- dmethvin 12y ago
  At some point in the decision process you should be weighing the cost of buying software/support vs. the cost of developing it in-house. Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, unless you have the luxury of a loose schedule and are being paid at something like $10 an hour. I think the reason these "cost concerns" are being expressed is that a programmer isn't trained to weigh these things objectively. It's like going directly to a surgeon with an ailment and asking their recommended course of action. Their expertise is surgery, so their resolution is more likely to involve a knife.
  - chaostheory 12y ago
    > Highcharts is not expensive compared to developing something similar yourself, Here's what you guys keep ignoring: there's other open source alternatives that are free. I'm not helping develop them beyond giving bug reports.

deleted 12y ago

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chaostheory 12y ago

1) As I've already said, High Charts isn't that much better than the free alternatives. 2) If you're bootstrapping, every penny counts. 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough.

jasonlotito 12y ago
> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html > 4) Not many people pay for libraries or frameworks anymore, when open source alternatives are either better or just good enough. Not many, sure. But then again, they aren't going for lots of smaller people, but instead, fewer large companies. This is smart, since they are pushing support services as well.
- ashwin_kumar 12y ago
  >> 3) It's not $590, it's $1500 (or more). >Just wanting to point this out, but the price for a single developer, with support included, is currently $590 according to this page: http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html http://shop.highsoft.com/highcharts.html OEM licence costs more than $1500.

deleted 12y ago

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