I have to admit its somewhat confusing who the pricing is targeting. For smaller shops, as you say, most project costs are fixed and ongoing costs over an unknown period of years are a concern (not to mention that the costs spike if the app goes viral for any reason - which isnt matched with a boost in revenue since these are usually branding apps rather than games with advertising/freemium models).

For mainstream apps, which I previously thought Qualcomm would be looking to court, the pricing model has a huge "dead zone" that could kill companies trying to produce self-sufficent AR apps that generate revenue.

Mainstream app ARPUs (Average revenue per user) begin low and gradually climb. Licenses targeting this market usually offer a free tier that allows the company to get over the initial "hump" where fixed costs are losing the company money (development, servers, support etc) that isnt recovered by a few cents per new user and a userbase of a few thousands. Then once the ARPUS climb over a dollar or two and the user base hits high 5 figures theres funds to pay key partners for additional features, or simply to scale with users in a predictable manner (hence BaaS's like Parse charging how they do). 

Vuforia seems to have copied the SaaS pricing structure without really looking at what it means for a company's growth - in this case a cost per user of 2/3/4 dollars during a period when ARPUs will be <$0.30 and when funds for multi-thousand/month enterprise licenses dont exist yet. This is the bootstrapping/seed phase of startups, or before getting traction and raising marketing investment  for game devs.

My suggestion would be a fixed cost for smaller shops that can be built into projects up front (even if that meant blocking cloud recos), and a much more lenient pricing structure for companies expecting to scale rapidly: Per-device pricing rather than per-reco, or much more generous packages, and overage fees that wouldnt give a startup board nightmares about appearing on Techcrunch (which should be a positive thing). The pricing structure needs to align with Vuforia's clients' successes and enable their growth, so a win for one is a win for the other, rather than presenting large areas of risk on the path to growth, and costs that will keep them looking for alternative competitors.

Why should the free option have a watermark?

I'd rather mention the technology in a menu / about screen than putting something that uses screen real estate. Specially with devices like the Epson Moverio or similar AR glasses.

Let me see, if i understand, I can not, build an app with Object Recognition, and put it in App store without paying a  Deployment Plan? or i can like before (free)?

Well put, 60days.

The pricing 'dead-zone' you're talking about makes it look pretty clear to me that smaller development agencies and startups are no longer (perhaps they never were?) the target market for this SDK.  This works out to about $5/user cost on the app - and a traffic spike could make an entire project go belly-up if your budget is under $50k.

It makes me very sad to see such a promising SDK turn into such a money-grab.  And I was willing to pay comparable prices to Metaio - I'm not looking for freebies.

But it has to be a win-win, and in this situation, the only winner is Qualcomm in almost every foreseeable case.  So, Vuforia (if you're listening?) take note, or cue the AR developer exodus.

p.s.  Why on earth would you roll out a major API upgrade, including alarming pricing, to the developer community at 4pm or 5pm on a workday, and leave no one to man the phones (forums, social media, etc) during the reaction?  Obviously you're going to have a support request every 2 minutes...  They really ought to send someone in here, or comments like these will rule the developer community's perception of this price point...  I imagine Metaio's just laughing and eating popcorn browsing social media and these forums.

gringofxs wrote:

Let me see, if i understand, I can not, build an app with Object Recognition, and put it in App store without paying a  Deployment Plan? or i can like before (free)?

Really?

that is the only answer you are going to give to this thread? naming the FAQ? :P

Simples words, i can? or need to wait 60 days, then i can

WATERMARK??

So does that mean when on the pricing page it says that you get 1000 "reco"s per month, we're supposed to assume that "reco" means "cloud-based" reco, even though this contradicts the definition of a "reco" in the developer license ("“Recognition” or “recognition” or “reco” is a transaction event that is registered by the Software when any Target is recognized successfully as reported by QCE’s system.")? Please understand that as a developer I'm skeptical of this until the "cloud-based" modifier is added to the pricing page, since your info contradicts the info on the pricing page as well as the developer agreement.

No, with the watermark you have no limit on offline recos, just in cloud recos, but if you want to remove the watermark... there you have the limit for offline or cloud recos.

I pretend to do a Object Recognition app and one Image target app. There no need to use cloud.

It will display Watermark?

If you don't pay, yes...

So basically this new pricing scheme implies that if you do only offline recos, one should stay on the free tier, and accept the watermark, since there is no limit on the number of non-cloud-based recognitions, whereas if you start paying, you immediately begin to incur limitations on both offline or cloud recos? That makes no sense whatsoever. I think that's why I was so confused earlier. I hope that's a typo, because it makes an already infuriating pricing scheme even moreso.

With the ties in with Unity I would have thought they would go down the route of a monthly plan that covered all apps, not individual. I'd happily pay $99 per month for unlimited apps and unlimited offline reco's (frame markers and image targets) in the same way Unity offer their Free and Pro packages.

It would also be better suited for competition against companies like Metaio who want a large sum upfront (can be cost prohibitive to indie developers), but after that you can use their system on unlimited apps and have unlimited offline triggers.

I really hope they reconsider this price plan for the many developers that don't use online functions.

I really hope they reconsider this price plan for the many developers that don't use online functions.

Yes

I was happy to see the new version supporting iOS 64-bit but the new business plan is defintly killing your indi developers like us I am happy to pay the fees for online reco and I'm even happy to pay for every offline marker that I upload to the target manager database... BUT having to pay for offline reco is a defintly NO to your sdk.

and the worst part is that the offline database needs to check the lisence key online before enabling the AR camera? this looks like a joke to me. the name says, it's "offline" which means my app is not going to connect to internet. with the new SDK this can't be the case!

if you guys are not reconsidering the new business plan, I will have to go with alternatives.

I really hope we can hear something useful from mods...

Hi,

most things that run through my mind (and are not very nice) are already said in this threat (in more polite words ;)
but I felt the need to join the choir in order to tell vuforia even stronger what we think about the new pricing plan.

But I have one more question, that wasn´t asked yet I think:

"Note that internal use apps must deploy with a platinum plan"

I´m very curious about where this one starts since I think "internal use apps" are Apps that are distributed with an enterprise provision profile (ios-speaking)
and we develope quite a few of these, that are not supposed to get into the app-store...

Regards

Maik

This is a real shock. I was developing Apps based on Vuforia for many years and would never expect such move from Qualcomm. This pricing plan is totaly insane and it has nothing to do with the reality. 
It will kills many indie projects.

1. Why is Qualcomm not offering a flat fee?

2. 99 USD / Month = 1.188 USD / year. How many AR Apps in the App Store are making more the 1.200 USD/year? According to Appannie, 92% of AR Apps are below this threshold. What will happen with those Apps? Is Qualcomm assuming that the indie developer will subsidize those Apps? I guess that many indie Apps will disappear. 

This is a really sad development.

Martin

- dobesgames -

Wow, I've never stopped dead in my tracks as quickly as I have seeing the introdcution of pricing. Like many I'm no opposed to paying a fair price but these are totally out of line and really just greedy. Qualcomm has made Vuforia junkies of us all and now is cutting off supply unless we fork out huge ammounts.

Do they not know how developers and small businesses work, do they think we can just go back to our customers and say 'Sorry Mr Customer, that app I developed for you - welll what you paid was just the tip of the iceburg and now I need you pay a whole lot more' How many customers do you think I would loose if I did that? All of them and so thats why Qualcomm will be loosing me. I can't work with any suppliers that treat their customers this way, how can I trust them, how can anyone trust them?

So I will slip on over to a competitor, swallow the additional costs of the SDK and redevelop all of my apps at my own cost so that I can hold on to them and not damage the relationship I have worked so hard to develop.

I used to trust and respect Qualcomm and I am sure they will have all of the nice responses prepared explaining why things have changed. But listen up Qualcomm its us developers that build the apps for these big businesses you want handing over large amount of cash and how many of us do you think will recommend Vuforia after this? So you might think that you can wave bye to your existing developers and welcome in some higher earning ones but who will deliver them to you?

I agree, the pricing and the support options for the plans is making us consider alternatives as well.

These plans simply are not affordable for most of vuforia devs and their clients. A buffer of 6 months of Vuforia 4.0 without plans to allow developers to change technology on their AR apps or to discuss with clients the strategy seemed logical to me. Even Apple do not use this non sense deadlines and Qualcomm is not Apple.

We will migrate to another AR SDK, not because we do not want to pay, but the plans are too expensive and limiting the recos is crazy because after crossing the limit you charge each, this lead to an unpredictable cost in the app market which is quite liquid.

All of this coupled with pour communication in general lead me to think Qualcomm is simply try to clean the dev base.

We're a small dev company doing Games, AR and VR. We've created 6 AR apps with Vuforia so far, 2 of them using cloud-reco, one of them using the old 99$ / 10k reco model. Now we're pretty much being forced out of Vuforia. The 3 main reasons are:

a) None of our customers is ever going to accept a watermark. That means that we have to go for the 99$ plan for every single app, no matter what. For small, gadget-like apps with a runtime of e.g. 2 years, adding at least 2.4k to the bill is just what makes the customer re-think about his need for an AR app.

b) One of our apps is used in a museum, installed on 10 iPads. A second museum app is in the pipeline. Since this is "internal use", it requires a platinum price plan and will therefore cause 5-figure-number per year running costs (Gold plan is 12k, so I guess it's 20k+). That's more than the total budget for the whole app.

c) We rely on this software to work in our day-to-day jobs - therefore, information & support is important for us to plan the future, write proposals and fix technical issues. Yet, transparency & support around this launch is abysmal. I understand that the mods can't do anything but relay us to the FAQ, but overall this issue shows how much importance the community & the users enjoy inside Qualcomm. The fact that even for the 1k/month plan we're not given direct support (!), but expected to go to the forums, suggests that this isn't going to change anytime soon.

The outrage around the new pricing may look emotional, but in the end it's all just about business for us. And creating AR apps using Vuforia is now simply not a profitable business option anymore.

Yes, that is way too expensive / bad license format..cannot do montly payments+random extra fees.

There should be option for one time payment for unlimited use WITHOUT cloud (even if that is xxx usd, and then upgrade price on next major version)

Even afraid to think how much the platinum version will cost...

Starting to look for alternatives asap, any recommendations for AR+Unity?

AdvancedTech wrote:

Yes, that is way too expensive / bad license format..cannot do montly payments+random extra fees.

There should be option for one time payment for unlimited use WITHOUT cloud (even if that is xxx usd, and then upgrade price on next major version)

Even afraid to think how much the platinum version will cost...

 

Starting to look for alternatives asap, any recommendations for AR+Unity?

Luckily, there are alternatives to Vuforia:

This Augmented Reality SDK comparison chart compares Augmented Reality (AR) SDKs and frameworks:

http://socialcompare.com/en/comparison/augmented-reality-sdks

If anyone could clarify the following for me, that would be great.

1. Do all plans (free and paid) offer unlimited offline (device database) recognitions?
2. Do the paid apps essentially just increase the "cloud based reco" count and remove the watermark?

So, if we was to develop an app, which only uses offline recoginitions (device database), we could use the free version for unlimited offline recognitions with a watermark, or pay $99p/m to remove the watermark and still get unlimited offline recognitions?

I dont like the way that the terms have been worded on the FAQ and pricing. There should be a clear definition to describe the above, which outlines what the "offline" and "cloud" based limits are.

Thanks for all of your detailed feedback. We’re reading every post and we hear you. Stay tuned for updates coming shortly.

Vuforia Sales will be closely monitoring and replying to this thread:https://developer.vuforia.com/forum/license-manager/vuforia-40-licensing-discussion

edited. game over.

So just discovered the new pricing plan and i'm aghast, even at the new classic plan. I have no idea who Qualcomm are targetting with Vuforia, but there can't be many that can afford this. 

The standard plans have combined the worst possible charging methods into a single big horrible method, per month, per app, with per month usage limits, really? I can't even imagine the budgets needed to support such apps with on-going concerns and the chance of getting stun with over-charge payments, not to mention the need for always connected apps too.

Over the last few years i've done 5 client projects using vuforia and only one would be remotely feasable with any of the new pricing schemes. Even then I doubt the client would agree to anything but the 'classic plan'. One other might be possible with Classic plan, but would be touch and go. The other three projects would simply not be feasable with the standard pricing plans and the 'classic' plan amounts to anywhere from 10%-40% of the project budget. Going with the free watermark version would not be an option either for these projects.

So thats it then 60% of my AR projects are no longer feasible and whilst a couple of larger projects might justify the $499 per app classic plan, it wont take many before it becomes far more efficient to just switch to a fixed price unlimited apps competitor.

Honestly i'm shocked at how out of touch these pricing plans seem to be, especially when Qualcomm must have realised a great deal of the draw to Vuforia was due to the already over-priced plans of its competitors. Sure being free was a heck of a draw too, but for me again the price of competitors effectively priced themsevles out of the market in exactly the same way Vuforia have now done.

It seems so strange when in recent years there has been an explosion in indie develoment through the clever use of low price, unrestrictive licensing like Unreal, to a lesser extent Unity and even apps like Photoshop/Premiere from Adobe. The key is to get as many developers paying a small amount monethly and make up in volume, rather than stifle creativity and recognition with absurdly high prices and risky licenses.

So the future of AR for me looks bleak, i'll keep tabs on Vuforia but as only high budget projects will be able to afford it i'll probably look to invest my R&D into other technologies like Kinect, Hololens, Occulus Rift which will have far better ROI.

Agreed. The act of trying to pass this major change on us without even notice makes me question Vuforia's ability to be trusted. If there is no notice then how can we as developers plan for the future. How can we pass on cost to clients if we don't know its coming. What about projects we are currently working on where we have set a one time fee for development and not for licensing? This hasty and un -transparent act will surly backfire. Metaio looks alot better now that I know its a one time fee and not a ever changing plan. 

Also why start this now? Most of the world has no idea what this technolgy is. I cannot make sales easily now. It will be impossible once I have to tell my client that there are liscensing fees and I can't guarentee how long anything will work or not work as described.

Too soon.

Too abrupt. 

@dm3d - what about apps that don't use cloud reco?  if we have 30-40 targets on device, and we want the free watermarked plan, what's the sitch?

I pretend to do a Object Recognition app and one Image target app. Without no need to use cloud and online functions.

Just put it on Apple store and Play store.

It will display Watermark?

adocracy wrote:

@dm3d - what about apps that don't use cloud reco?  if we have 30-40 targets on device, and we want the free watermarked plan, what's the sitch?

 

I apologise for the mass of "quoteception" you're about to recieve, but you sound like this post could help you.

Foemass wrote:

Foemass wrote:

Chenoabere wrote:

But check the plans carfully, to do that, you need to be under Platinum Plan...

Hover your mouse over the word limitations on the pricing page; there is a hidden paragraph, which admittedly still doesn’t complete the picture.  For the entire picture you need to read their new licensing agreement which defines cloud based recos and reco’s as separate things, then you need to search the depths of these forums for responses received by other confused devs and then finally, after this long journey, you’ll arrive at the truth.  

 

Hmm, I think I just gave myself a new game idea ;).  

 

EDIT: I'll see if I can find the particular post I learnt this from and give you some peace of mind. 

 

ok here we go, from here: https://developer.vuforia.com/forum/vuforia-40/monthly-device-database-1000-recos-or-unlimited-recos
 

vamshi wrote:

Hi Developers,

We are deploying one app with 1 tracker as device database. 

I dont want to pay money.Can i upload the build in playstore and app store with watermark ?

Total how many recos will allow monthly ? 1000 recos or unlimited recos? 

Can anyone suggest ? 

Thank you.

vamshi

 

VuforiaSales1 wrote:

Yes. You can deploy with watermark and unlimited number of recognitions on the device database associated with your license key.

Also, stay tuned for updates coming shortly.

Vuforia Sales will be closely monitoring and replying to this thread:https://developer.vuforia.com/forum/license-manager/vuforia-40-licensing-discussion

The worse thing about those pricing announcements is the lost of trust in Vuforia. 

I have a very bad feeling to work on a platform which is incalculable. 

Only if the Vuforia team rolls back to the old business model immediately I could reconsider this platform for any further development. 

Anything else is out of discussion.

Qualcomm has always spoken in vague terms about their eventual pricing policy for Vuforia, so I feel that this pricing change is (difficult to swallow so I will be looking at Metaio et al) within their rights. But I also feel that existing projects that don't use the cloud should be grandfathered in. We built lots of projects on Vuforia because it was best in class AND free, and I've promoted Vuforia to other developers because of those exact reasons. I don't think I'll be promoting Vuforia any more over other solutions and I'll probably even have to migrate my existing projects to a Metaio package at fairly significant expense - if I'm going to end up there eventually anyway, I might as well roll these projects into their open-ended package. 

I also feel like we were essentially coerced into moving to Unity and spending thousands of dollars on that software because Vuforia worked better there. So it seems like this pricing decision is costing us, in real dollar terms, north of $10k. Not cool Vuforia. 

Would be better if you grandfathered released projects that used 3.0 on-device. At least that way we wouldn't have to consider killing them or migrating them - all of which are now on the table, thank you very much Vuforia. 

Please upvote if you agree about grandfather status. 

Vuforia be realistic, why you don't give an option like metaio gives. One time payment for offline apps, without internet connection. I understand you need to earn money, but lets us also live. Please leave vuforia like was in previous version.

adocracy wrote:

Would be better if you grandfathered released projects that used 3.0 on-device. At least that way we wouldn't have to consider killing them or migrating them - all of which are now on the table, thank you very much Vuforia. 

Please upvote if you agree about grandfather status. 

The grandfathering is a very important fact of the entire pricing change. It is very difficult to continue our business with this changes.

We already informed our customers about the price adoptions. 2/3 of our customers are going to discontinue the business relationship with us, since the price increase is just unacceptable for them. Many thanks Vuforia for those business changes. 

Move on now... nothing to see.

Qualcomm clearly understood the backlash that the new pricing plan would produce, and they're not budging - there seems little point in complaining further. I'm guessing that Vuforia was part of a new round of cost cutting within Qualcomm and to be fair this is a public company and they have every right to charge what they like. Personally I think they've made a mistake - there were absolutely monetization options here that could have been huge, but it's like this was planned out by someone with no real grasp of the mobile development ecosphere. Why on earth would Qualcomm deliberately kiss off evangelists for Vuforia and the folks who effectively helped develop the product? I hope they're not planning any similar kinds of projects in the future, since developer support will now be non-existant. Anyway, what's done is done and  it's their product to control.

The flip side is that this has been handled horribly/cluelessly and the Qualcomm PM responsible should be fired. 

gregquinn wrote:

Move on now... nothing to see.

Qualcomm clearly understood the backlash that the new pricing plan would produce, and they're not budging - there seems little point in complaining further. I'm guessing that Vuforia was part of a new round of cost cutting within Qualcomm and to be fair this is a public company and they have every right to charge what they like.

Personally I think they've made a mistake - there were absolutely monetization options here that could have been huge, but it's like this was planned out by someone with no real grasp of the mobile development ecosphere.

Couldn't agree with you  more. Although the 'Classic' plan might allow some future projects for me and my clients, most projects are now dead.

The most bizzarre thing about this is just look at what Epic and Unity Technologies are doing at GDC this week. Both have now provided completely free full versions of their engines to developers. Epic require a royality, whilst Unity require $1500 once you exceed $100k p.a. This type of forward thinking business is going to both massively grow Epic and Unity userbase and the creative output without placing artifical monetory blocks on developers. This is basicaly the opposite of what Qualcomm have done with Vuforia 4

One can only hope Qualcomm see the error they've made in treating everyone the same, knocking out the low end market completely and find some way to correct it.

Any updates on that?

This pricing structure seems insane. We've just secured our first paid project and it already looks dead in the water because the fees required to deploy an 'internal' app are ten times the revenue we're getting from it.

Does this plan just apply to Vuforia 4 ? Can we still use 3.x for free?

@cgeye - we received your picing request today, and our Sales team will get in touch with you. 

Thank you. hopefully you can offer some reassurances.

Outrage is a strong word.  But I think it's justified here. 

Not only are we scrambling trying to get 32bit and 64bit issues sorted out.  But we don't even know what it's going to cost us *if* we manage to get all of the issues sorted out. 

Right now, the situation appears unworkable. 

I also can recommend another useful guide about  7 Best Augmented Reality SDK To Start AR Development ( https://invisible.toys/best-augmented-reality-sdk/ ) , hope it will be useful for you .