The most visible part of it is a new logo and website, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Today, we’re also releasing a major upgrade of our business model and addressing the principal criticism we’ve heard from the community: our licensing and pricing policy.
Until today, the only licensing option was to purchase a license for every team member, even before writing your first line of production code. That was a high barrier to entry for customers. Those who went over that barrier often achieved a very high return of investment – 25x is not unusual – but of course, most developers just would not take the risk.
Our principal objective with this release is to make our adoption curve smoother.
More free goodies
First good news: we’re giving away more features for free in our new edition called PostSharp Essentials that replaces and surpasses PostSharp Essentials.
Here is what you now get for free:
- Simple aspects (OnMethodBoundaryAspect and MethodInterceptionAspect)
- Architecture validation (build-time code validation)
- Contracts (preconditions, postconditions)
- [NotifyPropertyChanged] on auto-implemented properties
- Logging in developer mode
- Creation of low-level add-ins using PostSharp SDK
- Use of community add-ins (7 available at the time of writing)
- Apply any premium feature to a maximum of 1,000 lines of code.
The following features are premium:
- Location-level aspects, event-level aspects, composite aspects
- Simple aspects applied semantically to async and iterator methods
- [NotifyPropertyChanged] with non-auto-implemented properties
- Caching, XAML commands and dependency properties, undo/redo, multi-threading
- Logging in production mode
For more information, see PostSharp Essentials on our web site.
Per-Repo Subscriptions
Second good news: irrespective of the size of your team, you can use all PostSharp features for as little as $250 – or $50 if you just want logging.
Besides Per-User subscriptions, we are introducing Per-Repo subscriptions where the price does not depend on the number of daily unique users, not even on the size of your repository. Instead, the price depends on the amount of code where you want to use PostSharp.
So, if you liked PostSharp Essentials and now want to apply premium to more than 1,000 lines of code, you can now purchase a license by increments of 1,000 lines of code. Compare this to having to buy a license upfront for each team member.
Also, this license is transferable, so if you’re a consultancy doing custom software, you can transfer the license to your customer along with the source code.
For details about Per-Repo Subscriptions, see this blog post about why and how we're doing it.
Per-User Lite Subscriptions
For people who still want a per-user subscription but want to reduce their initial bill with PostSharp, we’re introducing Per-User Lite subscriptions: compared to standard Per-User Subscriptions, it comes with a 30% discount, but it does not contain a perpetual license. At the end of the year, you can choose to renew your Per-User Lite subscription, switch to a perpetual license, or stop using PostSharp.
Community Add-Ins
We have released the following add-ins under the open-source MIT license. They can be used for free with PostSharp Essentials:
- PostSharp.Community.ToString (ported from ToString.Fody)
- PostSharp.Community.Packer (ported from Costura.Fody)
- PostSharp.Community.UnsafeMemoryChecker (our original contribution)
- PostSharp.Community.DeepSerializable (our original contribution)
- PostSharp.Community.StructuralEquality (ported from StructuralEquality.Fody)
- PostSharp.Community.Virtuosity (ported from Virtuosity.Fody)
- PostSharp.Community.HelloWorld (a project template)
Summary
With PostSharp 6.6, we’re introducing a new free edition called PostSharp Essentials with a lot of unlimited free features and the possibility to apply premium features to 1,000 lines of code per app. For those who reach that limit, we’re introducing the Per-Repo Subscription, where the price depends on the number of lines of code that you enhance using PostSharp.
Thanks to these new licensing options, you can jump on a 25x ROI immediately, with a minimal upfront investment, and increase your subscription size as your use of PostSharp increases.
Happy PostSharping!
-gael