HARMAN pricing. Is it realistic?

[ASWC]

HARMAN pricing has been announced and is not cheap. I said in a few posts it will likely be low and I was simply wrong. My company already said NO (I asked) and we are now leaving AIR for good.

I sure do understand the need for HARMAN to profit but it seems to me that pricing is too high. As a result maybe some people are going to pay while actively seeking alternative solution and quickly leaving the tech afterward.

What do you guys think of that pricing? Good for the future of AIR or not good?

[Frédéric C.]

thx1138  a écrit

or add Royalty options:

• 2%-4% percent

This would be a pure nightmare. Do you imagine how complicated it would be to communicate all your numbers to Harman so royalties can be computed? I already do that with most of my other business partners, and I had to develop specific software just to compute things accurately and generate corresponding accountability documents.

[PippoApps]

Probably the price tier already considers losses due to all the "free" publishing that might require a paid subscription. Very hard to check.

[el111]

I think the price ranges are OKish for say a single developer,

Eg 200k per year costs 999 for the license or 0.5% of gross income.

I am thinking though of a shop in, for arguments sake, India with 10 developers. Salary of developer 8k per year (? rough estimate). That's now 5% of gross income and 12.5% a developer cost.

The per developer "seat" cost seems imbalanced somehow. I could be completely wrong (I am not based in India) and assume Harman have crunched all the numbers and stats from the play/app store to arrive at the tiers.

[Frédéric C.]

el111  a écrit

I think the price ranges are OKish for say a single developer,

Eg 200k per year costs 999 for the license or 0.5% of gross income.

I am thinking though of a shop in, for arguments sake, India with 10 developers. Salary of developer 8k per year (? rough estimate). That's now 5% of gross income and 12.5% a developer cost.

The per developer "seat" cost seems imbalanced somehow. I could be completely wrong (I am not based in India) and assume Harman have crunched all the numbers and stats from the play/app store to arrive at the tiers.

To be precise, the Pro tier begins at 50k+. 200K is actually the higher limit for it.

[el111]

Fair point on the range being 50-199

PippoApps I was trying to illustrate a point that there are different setups where the costs could be punitive.

[PippoApps]

True. They might adjust for different countries. Also Adobe CC has slightly different prices depending on country. Mostly depending on VAT rules and exchange rate. But certainly not in line with living costs or average wages.

[el111]

PippoApps

Thinking then of an "indie" developer in say Western Europe with a gross income of $60k (before app store cut, tax, equipment etc), not a huge income relative to living costs. They fall into the pro category and would have to pay 999 pa. I definitely think the bands need further consideration from HARMAN.

[PippoApps]

True. They might as well raise the 50 to 80 or 100, that would be more reasonable.

Though, this is only for store published apps.

I.e. I do not publish any app on my own, but I will buy a license. Let's say I sell an app for 50k to a large corporate client, I might as well sell 40k for consultancy, team leading, UX, etc. and 10k for AIR app development.

So I guess we are talking about making 50k out of all apps in the stores for company with completely internal staff. But also in this case I might argue that part of those 50k are for marketing for example. Or me and my partners we might buy each a <50k license and sell software development services to the company for 49k.

These kinds of licenses mostly rely on fair play on the developer side. It is up to the developer decide how fair it has to be consider his own situation, and keep it completely legal.

The licensee would intervene for example if Angry Birds reports to be <50k, in that case they might file a lawsuit.

I hope I made myself clear. Maybe being italian I am more used to think in terms of bending the rules?

[PippoApps]

The "per seat" thing imho is mostly for big corporations that need to follow strict practices (and do not really care about budget). We might well see 10 developers working on an ActionScript base, and one developer worrying about the builds on just one seat. There's plenty of space to be creative.

[ASWC]

I agree that indy developers might not be too bothered by the watermark and still opt for the free tier but the problem with companies is that they are asked to:

1. pay for the tech.

2. the tech future is uncertain.

3. not much is known about the company that maintains it and their plans.

So that starts to be a big list of red flags for companies.

[Leo Kanel]

ASWC​ You really think the future is uncertain? For me it looks crystal clear.

[ASWC]

What do you see in that crystal ball? I've been called out for saying "dead" so I switched to "uncertain future", a tech with an "uncertain future" is a tech that is not doing very good. For me, considering the state of AIR, this new HARMAN pricing does not make any sense if the goal is a long term future for the tech. If the goal is a short term future then sure, cash out, get out, done. If they have a long term goal for AIR and they succeed starting with that pricing model then they will absolutely blow my mind, I just cannot see how any of this is gonna attract anyone.

[rewb0rn]

Hey guys, we are falling under the enterprise tier and I am positive about the whole licensing model and cost structure. I as well as others here always said we would be happy to pay for licenses to help the development of Air. Now it's time to put the money where the mouth is.

When comparing the license model to Unity, keep in mind that for Air you might not need a seat for every developer on the team. For Unity, a developer can only work if they have a license, otherwise the editor will not even work. We are planning to incorporate an Air seat for our build server and 1 or 2 devs that will responsible to publish to mobile for the test builds. In this scenario, if you pay for less licenses than you have devs, the $2000 seat becomes competitive with Unity. Obviously this only helps the teams, not the sole developers, but it's worth mentioning I think.

Also consider this from the business perspective of Harman. If they want this to be profitable, in theory they need to make $100,000 per developer per year they put on this (in practice much more). I understand that most of you want to get as much as they can for as low as possible, but putting that aside, $199 per year sounds reasonable and fair to me.

[rewb0rn]

michaelarchbold​ My understanding is that the revenue that the apps make is Air related income. As you publish all the apps for all your clients, all the revenue that these apps make are tied to your company license. Meaning you would have to acquire one license and it will cover all apps from all your clients, as long as you use your account to publish it on behalf of all your clients.

I could be wrong, but this is what would make the most sense to me, since the licenses cover revenue from all apps a company publishes, not just single apps.

[marchbold]

But if that's the case then it requires our clients share the revenue their apps are making with us, which has never been our model in the past and we don't have access to that information currently. I expect our clients will consider this an invasion of privacy and will look elsewhere for services if that is the requirement.

I hope it will be related to the net revenue we directly make out of providing AIR development services, however even that can be difficult to ascertain on a project. We often combine web and hardware development with our AIR apps so the direct amount of net revenue from a project related to AIR is often hard to ascertain.

Also I'm worried about the additional amount of accounting we are going to have to do to provide audit information if requested.

Definitely have no problems paying, just need clarification on what these tiers represent and how they expect us to provide the information. It seems solely based around a company profiting directly from a published application and is ignoring other uses.

[Flashneverdies]

I highly doubt you will have to get involved with chasing up app developers (like me) who use your plugins. Income that app devs make is a separate thing. The 'income threshold' should relate to the intellectual property owner. If you just make plugins that other devs use, or even publish on behalf of other clients - they should do their own accounting.

p.s I will re-post on your help forum soon. The Advanced Camera Roll import needs a lot of work, and I've had no help yet. Currently I can't even use the plug in. I've already waited a few weeks.. Thanks, Matt

[marchbold]

If you are replying to me, I wasn't referring to our ANE work but client work where we produce things like installation apps or apps where the client goes on to profit but not us.

Seems very uncertain how they decide what is income from air. Only makes sense to me when you are talking about a company developing and profiting directly from a standalone air app. If the air app is only a piece of a project how do you define what is profit from the air app? We have some projects that we just add a small app to but the project is majority not air so do we (or our clients) have to pay a large ongoing license even though it's only a tiny piece of the project. We'd probably decide to drop these air apps and do them natively just to avoid the additional accounting.

Note: We are working on the camera roll ane, please see our notes in the issues to get an older working version in the meantime.

[hferreira80]

"If the air app is only a piece of a project how do you define what is profit from the air app?"

I have exact the same scenario as you.

I have a solution with web, desktop and mobile !

The Mobile it's tiny and developed with AIR.

Who is using the Mobile are the clients of my clients (can be literally several thousands), so it's not fair for me to pay and my directly clients would not like the unprofessional splash screen.

I'm moving to another tech and it's not I'm saying, it's already hapenning.

It's a tinny app not so difficult to replicate in any other coding language.

[Flashneverdies]

Ok, thanks Michael.

I'm sure the various tiers are just guidelines. I don't see how it'll be possible for them to actually find out the correct income for each developer. Too much grey area. I'll start with the free tier, that's for sure.

[ASWC]

Our main product is a subscription based product generating millions of dollars and we still have a few AIR apps for mobile that are not the product itself but a mean (among many) to access it. Obviously won't make a difference for HARMAN so since we have a HTML5 version ready to go, we'll switch the AIR apps for those for now and maybe finish up our Xamarin versions. But that's it for our company, those were the last remaining AIR apps, in a couple months all our AIR stuff is gonna go on a archive folder somewhere and that will be it. Nearly 15 years of working with Flash/AIR ends now for us, we started turning the page 3 years ago but it's quite weird to actually starting to put away everything AIR related. Heck I even closed my personal Adobe cloud subscription since no AIR, no Flash = no use for me. Huge page of my career that I'm turning but hey, the show must go on.

[zwetan_uk]

so you start a thread with

ASWC  wrote

HARMAN pricing has been announced and is not cheap. I said in a few posts it will likely be low and I was simply wrong. My company already said NO (I asked) and we are now leaving AIR for good.

and now you say that

ASWC  wrote

Our main product is a subscription based product generating millions of dollars and we still have a few AIR apps for mobile that are not the product itself but a mean (among many) to access it.

I'm afraid you are totally right, your company is too poor to be able to afford that $1999 enterprise license cost

wondering who is realistic here and who is cheap AF ...

[KramSurfer2]

We create customized point of sale apps for customer use while presenting to prospective customers. It's a product that is one part of our multiple services.  Our primary target is Desktop ( windows and mac ) and iOS. 

We'll be getting at least three seats when they turn their focus to desktop and iOS.

I don't think it's cheap, but I don't think it's outrageous either, given they're inheriting quite a mess with no guaranteed future market and a limited user base.  When you consider the abilities of the tech and the speed at which one can develop and deploy to multiple targets, it's reasonable.  

We're somewhat jaded as it's just been 'included' for so many years with our Adobe Suite, but really we've paid a high price for that 'free' as the platform has been ignored and reduced in ability and status.

[hferreira80]

Reading the several posts, seems that there are more AIR Desktop Apps that I would imagined.

Probably they are few Apps (comparing with Mobile) however I doubt that any of them are in the free tier.

An ignored market.

[Flashneverdies]

I’m also interested in Air for Desktop, as my some of my main mobile apps are more suited to Desktop actually.

However, the process for creating Air for Desktop looks more complicated that for mobile, due to having to provide your own certificates.

Questions:

1) Does anyone know if it’s possible to publish an Air for Desktop app for the MAC App Store? Is it even possible? (I use Adobe Animate on Mac, and I’m not very technical. I started out as a Designer..)

2) HARMAN - if you are reading this, I hope you will be providing up to date tutorials for beginners on how to publish to mobile and desktop from start to finish, using Animate.

There’s very little info about Air for Desktop out there, and I would like to see this promoted more, plus a showcase of Air Desktop apps that developers have made.

3) I also think $99 per year is much farer for Indie devs, because we have so many other costs and some of us earn very little app revenue.

4) HARMAN - would you consider a 6 MONTH FREE TRIAL while we switch to your new software?

Thanks,

Matt

[hferreira80]

"However, the process for creating Air for Desktop looks more complicated that for mobile, due to having to provide your own certificates."

It depends.

On mobile you are forced to provide thru App Stores (at least for iOS).

You can always provide Windows and macOS without certificate on your website.

Even so, I don't recommend to not warm the OS and you can easily create a batch that certificate your exe/app

"1) Does anyone know if it’s possible to publish an Air for Desktop app for the MAC App Store? Is it even possible? (I use Adobe Animate on Mac, and I’m not very technical. I started out as a Designer..)"

Yes, it is. I did it in the past. As said before, you can easily automate the process (probably give an opportunity to touch bar )

"3) I also think $99 per year is much farer for Indie devs, because we have so many other costs and some of us earn very little app revenue. "

$99 per year would be perfect for me. It's the same amount as Apple.

I know that it's different things but on my case, I "only" need for Desktop and I'm also an "Indie" dev with a lot of other costs to support.

Don't get me wrong but if you want to switch for iOS and Desktop there is no issue in a short therm (using the free AIR 32 or lower).

For Android, you should get proactive and started already.

However you can always pay one year and switch during that one year.