Lower cost individual plan

Feature Requests
#1

Not really a feature, but I will write this here as a feature request.

I heard Meredydd’s interview in the Talk Python to me podcast and I immediately started playing with Anvil. After a few hours playing with it I have some very positive and some very negative feeling. Unfortunately the most negative is the price, which is way to high for a toy.

The positive are that it is true: when this thing will be finished, it will really do for today’s web development what VB6 has done 20 years ago for desktop development. 20 years ago people kept telling me to stop using VB6, that it wasn’t good enough for high performance software. But I kept using it because it was very good for the software I was writing. I think Anvil is in the same position: it will never be good enough for applications requiring high performance and optimization, but it will be just perfect for 80% of small applications.

The negative are that it doesn’t seem to be ready for production (not a show stopper, I can wait) and it is too expensive (definitely a show stopper).

  • I don’t trust it enough yet to start using it professionally.
  • I am not paying $590 / year for a tool that may or may not be good enough for some simple non professional job
  • The limitation of the individual plan are too big for even the simplest use

I started with VB3, then VB6 (actually I started 10 years before VB3 existed, but that just makes me old) and when I heard about a VB6 inspired Python RAD environment I got all excited.

Yes, I used VB6 for years, first for fun then professionally, because it was easy.
No, I would never have used or even learned VB6 if I had to pay $590 / year for a limited plan or $1790/year for a full plan.

I (and all my friends) started with VB3, then switched to VB6, because it was easily accessible for free as a cracked version. The same happened to Autocad: it wasn’t the best, but was the most common because it was easy to get for free.

Then I (and all my friends) started working in VB6 (and with Autocad) seriously and we all bought licenses (and we all made VB6 and Autocad the most popular IDE and CAD software in the world).

Trial versions didn’t exist at the time. You just got a cracked version and you used that for a few months. Then you would buy a license if you liked it enough.

So here is my request: if you really want to be the VB6 of 2018 + Python + web development, you really need to make it more affordable for beginners. You could extend the trial period to one year, you could add python 3.6, users and uplink to the free version, you could make it free for open source applications, you could charge by app, by bandwidth, by number of users, by whatever you want, but you can’t charge $590 / year to start using a tool that is not production ready.

I will be back to check this wonderful tool in a few months, to see if I will trust it enough for a team license and professional use.

4 Likes
#2

I also got really interested while listening to the Talk Python to Me podcast and jumped on Anvil as soon as I could.
I must say I am really impressed by the ease of use of Anvil and that it reminds me of the positive aspects of VB6.
Congratulations to the team !

I totally second Stefano’s statement about the cost of the plan: in my view, Anvil has the potential to take an enormous place in the web development space, but the entry point has to be much more affordable for it to really take off.

#4

Hi all,

I’m not part of Anvil, but I am a very enthusiastic user and my comments are clearly biased by my positive experiences so far and my use cases.

I too was an avid user of VB6. I cut my teeth in 8080 & 6502, then C on a CP/M machine of all things but the ease of VB6 to just get something out there was an incredible revelation, almost epiphanic. I have two applications still running with clients, half decent applications as well. They are robust and productive and whilst I recognise what went on under the hood wasn’t always great (on error resume?) it helped me do my job, which was not to program but to solve problems.

Web development, however, I found just plain hard. Have no enthusiasm for it, yet I know I need to do it. Anvil has been a saviour for me, as it’s the perfect balance of code to magic, mostly in one rather super language.

I am one of those people using it in production. I build telephone systems for people that handle millions of calls. My Anvil apps handle call routing, statistics & live diagnostics. I provide CDR analysis and fraud detection systems, some of which have been ported and some are in the process of being ported.

Is it perfect? Not yet (and it may never be, what is?). But we have the ear of the developers. Is it a toy? I don’t think so as it helps me make a living, certainly more than the 60 quid a month I pay for it at the moment.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s circumstances, but for a company to survive it has to have paying customers. The infrastructure they run on is not free, and 20k people running a year trial would kill them! In my trial I was able to tell it was the tool for me. I recommend building something real with it (maybe something you already have so you can compare the development times).

This is just my opinion of course, and YMMV.

#6

Yaya! … 6502 … luvin it so far.

#7

Ha, that is interesting.

My previous company (I co-founded) built this : www.voiceblade.com
All in PHP, no framework, and a PIG to modify. So hard in fact, that we never bothered. We never got a version 2 done either. I therefore couldn’t see the point in just rebuilding it using traditional (ever shifting) web tech.

It now takes me a few days to get an application running. Probably a lifetime of tinkering, but that would be the same with any language/tool. It’s taking me a bit of time to adjust (and I have to do a lot of system support to pay the bills!) but dev time is now down in the days/weeks instead of months & months.

We have inbound call handling (IVR), outbound voice reach, revenue assurance tools (fraud detection), SMS campaign management and lots more besides. Not saying a skilled programmer couldn’t do all this in PHP et al, but now I can do it and I can change my mind all I like with only my time wasted :slight_smile:

Are you still in the telephony space?

2 Likes
#9

Here are my use cases.

  1. Professional

I have built tons of tools for engineering departments, from plugins for existing CAD / CAM software to my own CAD / CAM, many types of calculators, optimizers, BOM, inventory, paperless, etc. My current company is still using Lotus Notes in many departments, and I’m sure I would find an Anvil enterprise plan very useful in the process of replacing Lotus and much more. I have not done any serious analysis, but I think I would need the uplink in order to interact with our CAD / CAM, with Lotus, etc. and I would need active directory.

20 years ago I was in a similar position. I found this QB45, then VB3, then VB6 thing that was awesome, I started using it for many little tools, then I asked my boss to buy it, he had no problems buying Microsoft products.

Now I can’t build little tools with Anvil in the spare time in less than 30 days (not because Anvil is slow, just because I have no time), I can’t show anything serious to my new boss, Anvil is not Microsoft, there is no way my boss will give me a few thousand dollars.

  1. Non professional

I thought about starting by porting a little website (the first one I made a few years ago) to Anvil. The old website just shows some shared sheets from my Google Drive, nothing more. I wanted to import the data to the database and build more elegant views.

I wasted hours because the auto completion with Google drive doesn’t work, there is no API reference documentation, importing data from the old Google sheets is slow and it times out, but I enjoyed designing the form and working with the database. I’m on vacation and perhaps I will find the time to give it another try, but there is no way I sink $590/year on my pool league or any other fun project, and at best the final result will not have my custom domain. It’s a step backward.

Before I pay one dime I want to see a few working apps, see how they work with authentication and get them on a custom domain.

  1. For beginners

I’ve always been the software guy among mechanical engineers. I’ve always been the one people ask “how did you learn to do magic?”, “how do I learn?”.

In the nineties, with a friend that had just opened the first computer shop in my little town in Italy, we started “Computer No Problem”, the first school to teach you anything you wanted to learn about computers. Fast forward twenty years, and a few months ago my sister told me “I’m getting a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Perugia, my prof knows you, you taught him how to program”.

If that 14 year old kid had to pay to buy VB3 (just once, not every month) he would never have learned how to program and my sister would not have a master’s degree.

I have a little crowd of colleagues and friends asking me what book or what class to start with, or to give them some lessons. They are often willing to pay for a book, no one would ever pay for a subscription.

  1. Summary

The entry point of $590 / year is good for professional developers. If you can quickly see that Anvil is good for you, then a $50 all-you-can-eat price tag is great. Maybe even too low for people with good appetite.

It is too much for hobbyists that make no money with it.

It is unthinkable for the huge crowd of today’s beginners / tomorrow’s professionals (and university processors).

My opinion is that an (almost) fully featured free plan, only limited on the size or bandwidth, similar to Appengine, would really make Anvil the revolutionary RAD that VB6 has been, while the expensive entry point will make it “just” perfect only for a few thousand professional developers.

#10

I am all for paying less if less is an option but your argument has several issues.

  1. It is unreasonable to compare college students to Google. Google can afford to give away a product at no cost because it profits tangentially and/or will profit immensely with a few choice accounts. A homebrew duo just doesn’t have the same opportunities. They could do well for themselves working in someone else’s startup and in order for them to continue, it’s reasonable to expect that they should make enough to keep going.

  2. Comparing open source vs proprietary on an economics level creates meaningless correlations. The proprietary model allows for a low barrier to entry, but it locks out competition and locks the company into their service. Open source (and anvil specifically) do the opposite. While they do profit off a service, they also contribute heavily to Skulpt which is used freely by anyone. It’s more reasonable to expect Anvil to behave like any other source model than it is for them to behave like CAD or VB.

  3. Your conclusions are open ended. It is important to capture as much of the market as is possible. But how big is the market of Python developers who don’t want to spend time writing HTML/JS/CSS? How many of those developers actually would pay $40 or $30 or $20 per month? If they were to drop their prices by half, would their userbase more than double as a result? The only way that this makes economic sense is if the reduction of price creates more users which then result in more money overall. But if they drop the price by 50% and have a 5% - 10% increase in userbase, then it’s just a dumb move.

It would be nice if it were cheaper, but the economics of your argument would put them out of business. I would rather have them there at $50 than not at all.

1 Like
#11

Sergio, I agree on all your points.

I am sure that Anvil will be successful and profitable. It is too good not to be!
Perhaps they will do some tune up to their business model. For example, as I mentioned on my previous post, I think that an unlimited flat rate can be dangerously abused. But what they have can be great for them and for thousands of happy clients.

I posted this “feature request” as a comment relative to the possibility of Anvil to repeat the VB6 revolution. In the Talk Python to me podcast Meredydd talked about Anvil being today for web development what VB6 has been 20 years ago for desktop development.

I lived the VB6 revolution and I wanted to point out that VB6 was successful not only because it was easy and fast to use, but also because it was available to a whole generation of broke teenagers and young programmers that today are successful professional (and computer science professors).

Another thing they could add to their target audience could be schools. You can’t possibly ask $590 / year per student, but think of this picture:

  • Today Anvil offers free fully featured plans, limited only in bandwidth or number of clicks, to every high school student
  • In 5 years 1% of those kids wants to make some money with it and buys an Anvil subscription
  • In 5.2 years Chrome and FireFox introduce Python as an alternative to Javascript
  • In 37 years IE follows through

Sorry, Meredydd’s interview makes me dream!

#12

+1 for the lower-cost individual/developer plan.

i’d most likely be paying something to anvil already if such a plan existed – if only to get rid of the nags.

i’d also like to see anvil made available, fully, to people who can’t afford it at all, even a dev plan. maybe a percentage-of-app-transactions-model could work, something like payment processing companies do, like squareup.com (2.75% per transaction). maybe anvil could do 4.99% or whatever they needed to make the business go.

once a website/app got sizable (e.g. $10k/mo), then they could have the option to switch to a regular/non-percentage plan.

#13

I can see your point, but I fear a transaction based plan would make things more complicated. The current price structure is a more pragmatic approach that lets the team worry about features and service. As Anvil also has unlimited use cases that does not include apps with transactions, those situations would burden the servers but not generat revenue for Anvil (if the app didn’t handle transactions).
Honestly, I can’t see the problem with the current pricing. Normally I am very reluctant to spend money but in Anvil’s case I have not had a single regret.
The Anvil team is super engaged and agile to responses - on top of supplying a super productivity enhancing tool. Certainly I would welcome a price reduction - as in any other situation - but infrastructure and time cost money and as long as I receive far more value than I put in I am happy.

1 Like
#14

@david.wylie and @neriksen85: I never said 600 $/year is too expensive for professionals. I said it is too expensive for beginners and occasional users.

The Google appengine free service for example has very little limitations compared to the paid one and you can make a full website with it.

The Anvil free service has enormous limitations, and you cannot do or learn anything serious with it.

I think (it’s just my feeling, I have no experience and didn’t run any numbers and I could be wrong) Anvil should afford to offer the 0.1% of their resources to beginners and occasional users (almost) without limiting them on what they can do, just like Google does with appengine.

Limitations like preventing the free users from using the html property of the form components in my opinion alienate many beginners and occasional users, including many that could one day become paying professionals.

A resource based plan that includes all the features, with a free plan limited in the amount of resources (bandwidth, database size, number of users or transitions or forms, etc.) rather than on the available features, would allow many beginners and students to really start using Anvil.

All those beginners/occasional users will be very happy to start paying the used resources or switch to the 50 $/month when their sites takes off.

I also don’t agree with @dev01 when he says:

If Anvil=college students then they are not worth 600 $/year.
If Anvil is worth 600 $/year and lists Apple and other big names among their clients, then they can afford to reserve limited resources for free plan users.

#15

@stefano.menci - sorry for my lack of forum skills (lacking @xxx) and hope I did not offend anyone. My comment was mainly targeting the argument regarding a transaction based pricing, proposed by @psmithsf. I agree that from a beginners/occasional users perspective something more can be done to really magnify their usage - when Anvil can afford to do so.

#16

I’d like to second what @stefano.menci said:

Limitations like preventing the free users from using the html property of the form components in my opinion alienate many beginners and occasional users, including many that could one day become paying professionals.

As many others have said, I am super excited about Anvil’s potential. My particular use case is that I have some familiarity with HTML, CSS, and frontend design, and also skills with python for data analysis, but I have no experience at all with formal database management, and for backends I’d rather never touch Rails again. I really appreciate that Anvil fulfills my needs for a tool that uses essentially vanilla Python (as opposed to Django, Flask, Bottle, etc) to easily interact with frontend items and a prebuilt database, plus it handles hosting for me.

My frustration is that the HTML editor was only partially accessible during my trial of the Pro account. I can’t justify spending $49/month for this service yet, so I don’t actually know how straightforward the Anvil workflow will be for customizing the front end. I’ve reviewed the available blog posts and documentation, but the few mentions of the “git checkout” system leave much ambiguity: can a repo by synched by webhooks with Github or another provider? Is the git checkout local to my machine? Is it within the Anvil editor? What is the file structure of the HTML, CSS, and Python? These are the kind of questions I’d be able to pay $5 or $10/month to resolve, but unfortunately $49 is out of my price range in my current situation. I realize that says as much about me as it does about the features of this service, but it’s also possible that I’m not the only person in this category.

I’m sure the Anvil team has totally reasonable business plans, so I don’t expect them to need my advice. If they Anvil team is surveying interested users, I’d be happy to buy into the following freemium-style membership:
All features accessible for free, with limited unique visitors per app per day. Store my credit card on file. When my app hits a certain number of daily unique visitors—maybe 25 or 50—give me 24 hours to agree to a paid plan, or start throttling daily uniques, bandwidth, new apps, or the like.

Again, thanks to the Anvil team for this cool new service, I look forward to experimenting with it as it matures.

3 Likes
#17

Hi Everybody,

I have tested your environment and really like it because as a pythonist and VBA guy you feel at home right away.

I wanted to check if this could be an option to build up an alternate GUI for my IOT/Smarthome, but I had to find out that the uplink feature is also pro only.

So, I wish you all the best with your solution. It is really great.
Unfortunately it will never grow really great because nobody will give it a try with this ridiculous business model and pricing.

Anyway, good experience, thank you.

regards

Chris

1 Like
#18

I agree.
I already said in this forum that there should be a free plan limited only in bandwith/storage/number of request/whatever, without custom domain and with a big “Built with Anvil” banner.

They should give people like you full access to all the features, so you will stick around for a long time and perhaps one day you or one of your friends will switch to a pro user.

#19

I’ve merged this thread with Stefano’s original feature request.

We want to give as many people access to Anvil as we can, and we’re constantly reevaluating our pricing options. We would love to be able to give our full platform away for free to hobbyists – but if we gave everything away for free we wouldn’t be growing at all, because we wouldn’t have a business! It’s an unfortunate fact that there’s no clear difference between the features used for small business apps and the features a hobbyist might want to use, so we’ve drawn the line where we can.

@christian.kueken, I hope you get a chance to use Anvil at work, or in another environment where you have the budget!

3 Likes
#20

Unfortunately the company I work for sells chillers so I have no chance to use it in business on an regular basis. I thought of making some web calculation tools with anvil, but these tools will not earn money and honestly speaking I can’t recommend my boss to spend 600 bucks every year for a common toolbox. I think we will stay with desktop tools as these cost us nothing.

For my IOT usecase I have several other possibilities. That’s my point: you are overdoing in terms of price and for that reason your solution will not reach a broad user base.

IMHO the new trend not to sell something but make people pay for it every year is not a reasonable way, in fact not for the customer. I would never buy a solution if I am not owning it after buying.

Regards

Chris

#21

I liked the simplicity of anvil but I could never justify spending 600$/a for personal ‘minor’ hobby.
I would like to see a hobby plan for maybe 10$ per month (billed monthly, freez website if no new payments arrive and delete it a couple months later). I could live with restrictions like:

or no big banner :wink: but a short reminder during user login and a ribbon comparable to the github ‘Fork me on GitHub’ maybe ‘Forge a website on anvil’ , ‘Unleash your idea on anvil’, 'If your only tool is anvil then every problem looks like (a piece of) :cake: ’ … anyway I wish you good luck with anvil

Edit: You can use any of this slogans for a lifelong INDIVIDUAL plan granted to me :sunglasses:

1 Like
#22

I agree with devnow, stefano, christian, etc. Anvil is an amazing product and does everything that I’m looking for (creating a book recommendation site). If the subscription were $10/month (and not $120/year), I would stick with Anvil. Otherwise, I’ll tinker with Flask and MySQL until I get my site up and running.

I guess that 80% of Anvil’s potential customers are in the same boat as me, so Anvil would make far more profit with a lower-priced plan.

#23

Same here,
The cost is too high for a single developer.
I would love to use it for 10$/m

1 Like