In my opinion, you forgot make additional licence type. Something between personal and business. Is no matter how big is company- have 1 or 10k worker, you want 1k USD/year from each?. From one side is much, from second ridiculously low.
I had hoped for it, but was a bit disappointed ;/
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First, hats off to the entire development team for LVGL and now SquareLine, you guys are awesome.
However, I’ll have to second your opinion about licensing. I was so excited to see this wonderful and helpful tool. I was just about to purchase the hobbyist version when I noticed that it it severely limited to 50 widgets per project…that’s more like a demo/toy project!
Price is right for the hobbyist level but it is severely limited and therefore not useful. The price for the pro/business version is too high for us hobbyists that like to make serious software for ourselves/shareware.
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I think that here is also another matter. After year, you lost access to tool and to work what you do. It’s unnormally. I can lost access to support, but no to tool and my work. If I pay 1/10 license value then I get suport again for year- It’s popular.
Maybe I can pay 1k for license, but not for acces in each next year. Here is too much and bad solution.
World fashion goes to wrong way, everything for subscription- car, home, tool… wife. We will pay, will have nothing and we will happy. Klaus Schwab like it!
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I wrote a post in LVGL’s Forum about some ideas on the licensing. I copy it here too. Let me know what you think about it
Listening to your feedback we were thinking about the licencing model and would be very curious about what you think about followings. As we are still in very early stage we can still update the licensing.
- 30 days trial for a full version
- Free version with max 5 screens, and max 50 widgets, non commercial (same as the current - personal), not registration required.
- Professional same as free but for commercial too and pro features later
- Small (< 100k$ revenue per year or personal): ~$25 per month
- Large (>= 100k$ revenue per year): ~$150 per month
There were questions about lifetime licence for a given version which doesn’t depend on SquareLine’s backend. In this cases we can give a custom offer.
Do you mean $100, or is it $100k?
In the first moment when I readed 9$ per month for a year i thought thats to much for me as a hobbyist and i dont work every month on a LCD project.
Then i read that you also offer a licence for 11$ a month, and that sounds like a good deal. I have payed more for many ICs and breakoutboards around here that are untouched since years. If i have a project then i buy a licence for a month or two and thats it. Good work need to be payed good. If i think about what a great solution LVGL for all makers and even companies is and that all free of charge then this is a good way to pay for the developers.
About a free Version:
Yeah getting things free is nice and can pay off. I’m using Autodesk Fusion360 as a hobbyist since years, at the beginning they offer all services to makers. The problem some companys arent willing to pay for Fusion and use the privat licence for comercial. The only way to stop this was to disable more and more features until they hit the right one the companies need and pay for.
In my case there strategy of Autodesk was a success, i showed Fusion360 to my engineer at my new workplace (small company) and after 2 weeks they bought 3 licences and our full workflow is now based on Fusion360.
For LVGL it is for me a bit like with Fusion360, the main reason i need LVGL is that i want to create a proof of concept for my engineer and my boss. We use old ammeters on our devices which are very vulnerable and not contemporary. Now i develop a solution to use a LCD screen, MCU and a ADC. If this is a success, then i demand an amount for each device sold and they have to buy one or two SquareLine Studio licence for the company to bring the UI to a production state.
Long story short: A free Version would be nice but i think it is hard to stop companies using it for comercial, but it can also bring more “not programming” designer to use LVGL.
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I have a working project using LVGL. The project is gaining popularity. There was an idea to use SquareLine Studio to realize all the beauty and power of LVGL.
To compensate for the costs of supporting a web resource (paying for a domain name and renting a virtual server, buying debug boards and other elements), monetization of the project is needed. There can be no talk of any extraction of significant benefits. Monetization of the project will only partially cover all costs.
But a question arises. Which license should I use? Commercial? This is a cosmos price for my project.
Personal? There are hints of profit in my project.
How to be in this situation? Thank you.
Yes, I’ve updated my post. 
Thank you very much for sharing your experience. 
If you sell the project/product (for some money) than it’s a commercial project. Probably there are cases when it’s not that straightforward though.
Perhaps you can consider the photopea model. https://www.photopea.com/
The tool is free to use but has nonintrusive ads on the side. One can disable them for a fee for a while. He makes over a million dollars a year from this one man product!
I´m glad for free type of licence, but I would like to ask, if would be possible remove for this type of licence bond to the PC?
In my case, I use 1 desktop PC and 1 laptop. I share files via Owncloud between them so I can work at same project. When I used full trial version, this was not problem, but not long ago, my trial expired at my desktop so I registered for free licence at your website and now, when trial version expired at my laptop as well, I can not sing in as my registration is assign to the desktop PC.
I understand reason for this when you have subscription, but for free account it does not make much sense.
I know that I can register for another free licence with some other mail address, but would be possible to change this behaviour?
I would expect that if somebody would login and this person will not have paid subscription, you would skip checking if there is licence attached to the computer and just apply limits for screens and widgets.
I think, this would welcome more people than just me, but I understand that this could be technically bit problem.
Hi @dronecz,
Thanks for the feedback. We were thinking a lot about this topic and decided to limit the number of devices because of these reasons:
- Using SLS on more devices is a kind of advanced use case and we think it’s beyond the basic free/personal use case.
- We wanted to avoid having infinite number of users logged in with the same account if an account is leaked.
Thinking about it again allowing 2 devices/free license sill can make sense. We are still considering it.
I do not think this is “advanced case”. I use my desktop PC most of the time, but if I go somewhere and I want to work on my project or test something, I would like to use my laptop. If I want to use some free tool, I do not want to wait until I´m at certain device.
Ok, then limit number devices per free account or implement 2FA 
.
As I wrote, I understand why you do it this way, but for me does not make sense to use it this way for free plan. I will register second email, it is not so big deal.
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I am considering the small business license. I see that the FAQ states a license is bound to a specific computer. A number of engineers including myself have a desktop and a laptop for use when working remotely. Many companies do this now due to COVID and the progression of remote work in general.
Having to revoke a license within the app becomes a big hassle, especially if you are remote and cannot perform remote desktop to deactivate the SLS license.
Many SasS companies allow two devices such as Adobe Creative Cloud. Another thing Adobe Creative Cloud does is that it allows you to revoke a license from any activated device when logging in on a new device. Obviously this requires internet access periodically.
Please reconsider your single device policy. Allowing two devices is the least hassle for the end user.
Another option, which is more hassle to the end user, is to allow the license to be revoked remotely. This would at least solve the issue of using a laptop remotely when the desktop SLS was still activated and inaccessible. This would also solve the issue of having a catastrophic computer failure with an active SLS license.
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Thanks, we are thinking about a good solution.
Please continue to think about the licenses. I just signed up as a paying customer. I tested on my laptop first and then revoked my license for my desktop. Looking at my license online, I see you only get three revokes. This is on top of only being able to have SDS activated on one computer. This is not user friendly and kills my workflow.
I alternate between a powerful desktop at my office and a laptop. The laptop allows me to work elsewhere anytime, such as traveling, a co-working space, coffee shop, evenings, or even outside on a nice day. My internet is not good enough to VPN into my office and do remote desktop. It is easy to switch between devices for me because all of my projects are on GIT. I could burn three revokes in one week during development.
It is a hassle to revoke a license, which is limited to three times, and logs me out on top of the revoke. I used random generated passwords for security which I must look up each time. I likely have to email your support to get the revokes reset. If you are going to only support one device, then there should be no revoke limits. If you support a few devices, then a revoke limit makes more sense.
I do not share my computers or licenses. There must be a balance between what you want to protect and usability for your customers. At some point you have to trust your users since you cannot enforce everything. That is why you have us acknowledge your terms and conditions when first running SDS.
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I see your problem. Unfortunately it’s quite complicated to manage in a reliable way.
I’m sure that you wouldn’t fraud with such opportunity but I’m not sure about all others people. I see that if people find back doors to buy only one license instead of two, most of them will buy only one. And it’d be a pretty obvious hack to make two people log in with the same account (even is they are sitting next to each other in the same office). It’s really unfortunate that protecting against it negatively affects usability.
As SquareLine Studio does work without internet connection too (it’s required only for the first log in) we can not see what happens on offline machines. So if we allowed using one license on multiple computers, people could just block SquareLine’s internet communication on one computer and we never seen it again.
Anyway, we are thinking about it but I can’t see a good way now. If you have any ideas, we’d be happy to hear it.
Thanks for the explanation. I understand this is a complicated issue. This would be my idea to fix it.
Add an option for offline use and make it default so it doesn’t break current usage. When offline use is unchecked, internet communication is required. When SDS is opened, SDS checks out the license for use. When SDS is closed, SDS returns the license. Now the license is available on another computer which follows this same process. The user does not have to worry about revoking or logging in again. A computer using the active license could switch to offline mode so the license is not returned to the server.
This would be no different that your current strategy where you allow multiple computer use by revoking the license. The different here is that you have no revoke limit. You could limit the number computers allowed to be logged in at the same time and have a revoke count in case you need to change to a different computer.
This strategy would ensure that a license can only be used one person at a time. It is still difficult to prevent the issue of two different people using this feature. You could go a step further to bind it to the users login (at least for Windows) to ensure it is the same user. There isn’t much more you could do here unless you went to a dongle based license.
You could always offer a discount on a second license. But again someone could just share their account with a second license. I don’t need two programs active at the same time. I was just looking for an easier way to switch between systems.
At any case I think this is a lower priority item. I would much rather see features added like some of us have requested. I can be more careful about what computer I develop on and can contact you if my revokes run out.
It makes sense to have different “portable” license type. Thanks for the great idea!
We are discussing it.
I am one developer and have 3 machines (win/mac/ubuntu - laptops), and am creating a cost-only product (STEM / open-source kits). I want to pay per month only when doing development. I also have spotty internet (crossing 3 networks and 1 is very flaky). I would like to suggest an hourly check for license and unlimited revokes, with the offline option valid for 3days and only one machine at a time that is non-revokable (only by support) but is returnable. You would always be able to login if online even if your license was currently enabled for offline usage.
You would be able to quickly pick up on abuse by the number of offline requests or revocations or login/license requests from different ips / hardware IDs.
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