As a freelancer who made/makes apps/games with AR that are pretty small the clasic plan looks pretty bad . 

Mostly we do small apps and many so this plan is rubish .

I plan on moving to metaio if no other solution is found and my client agrees .

Oh yes, the classic plan is worse than Vuforia 3. We are happy, that Vuforia decided to offer the classic plan, but 499 Dollar per App ... We also think about developing with Metaio now. Sure, much more license cost at first, but unlimited Apps per license. And for example, we have some app which use AR Reco and there are a free and a paid version in the Stores. The free version is limited in content, but users can test the app first and decide then, if they want by the full version. Now with Vuforia 4 we must pay for both version 499 Dollar to use AR without watermark. Sure, we could use 1 App and make the full version as in app purchase. But this is not what we want or what our customers want. So we are for the "same" app on 998 Dollar and not on 499.

An unlimited license as on Metaio for offline recos would be much more usefull as a "per App license". Or a subscriber license with unlimited access like mentioned above. We use Unity and Adobe and subscribing is usefull!

It is also not fine, the the classic plan / offline reco plan is only for image reco and not for 3D-object reco. Metaio offers this in offline reco too as far as I know.

Cloud reco is fine, but was never usefull for use, because it is slow. Every customer prefer offline reco, because there is the real magic of AR. Things come immidiatly and not after requesting and receiving scandata from the cloud.

We hope, Vuforia will think about the classic plan and pricing options for offline reco apps or subscribing or flatrate or some other thing, that can be better in competition to Metaio.

Greetings,

Martin

This is the same comment I've made.

Both Unity and Adobe (who Qualcomm both have dealings with) have offered their products for flat free and subscription pricing and it works! I'm a Unity Pro subscriber for exactly that reason as it removed a massive outlay at the beginning but gives me everything I need.

Unity charge $75 per month (Unity Pro Windows only), but it means unlimited apps and if a project fails then I don't feel like there has been a massive cost outlay to try something out - I'm not put off by paying a small monthly fee.

Most indie's and small developers don't want to pay out a massive upfront sum if they can help it and that is why subscriptions work well and I think Adobe is also having sucess with this too.

If Qualcomm offered a $75 / $99 monthly fee, but that allows unlimited apps and unlimited offline reco without the silly nonsense of checking licences then I'm sure they would see developers coming in in droves because it is much more competitive against Metaio and their flat fee.

If they stick with expensive monthly fees or equally expensive 'per app' pricing then developers will weigh up the costs versus Metaio's flat fee and decide that after creating 6 app at $499 per app they could purchase the Basic Metaio SDK and get access to more functionality than what Qualcomm is offering on their $499 per app plan.

Me personally, I like the Vuforia platform, but as a small business I'm beginning to feel pushed out by Qualcomm and although it's a large outlay to begin with I'm thinking a larger flat fee would work out better in the long run.

Qualcomm, put in a subscription option for unlimited apps and unlimited offline reco at a sensible price and I'll happily stick with you and recommend to you other developers, clients and the university students I deal with.