We have published another blog post with a summary of the changes to the commercial developer licenses here.
The Qt Company has invested heavily in developing new features and functionality and acquiring new technology to expand our product offering. The feedback from the market has been that our license offerings, terms, and conditions are complex and challenging to understand. Therefore, we are streamlining and simplifying our commercial offering. One of our primary goals is to "make it easy to do business with us,” and we believe that the changes outlined in this blog post will put us on the path to our goal.
Here are the highlights of what we are planning to change:
- We are streamlining and consolidating our developer license offering down to four editions
- Qt Design Studio will be both included in the developer licenses and offered separately
- Customers with a subscription license will be able to distribute applications after the expiry of their Qt developer licenses
- Our Quality Assurance Tools are now covered under a single Qt License Agreement with developer and designer tools
Existing customer licenses and ongoing negotiations will not be affected by these changes. The new portfolio and licensing will be available from the 1st of February 2022.
Consolidation of our developer offering
To reduce complexity, we are consolidating our developer offering down to four main license editions, as illustrated in the table below. The higher-level an edition, the more features it includes. Each edition builds on the previous one in an onion-architecture license.
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Figure: Commercial developer offering editions in an onion architecture. The upper-level licenses include features and functionality in the 'inner / lower' layer.
You can see in the picture that we are incorporating several add-ons, which used to be sold under a separate license, into the overall offering. These commercial add-ons provide machine-to-machine (M2M) protocols, libraries to develop user interfaces for microcontrollers, and functionality for safety-critical applications, automotive-specific purposes, and application management.
How does this impact me?
Subscription license holders of ‘Qt for Application Development’ will be converted to ‘Qt for Application Development Enterprise’ licensees. Subscription license holders of “Qt for Device Creation” will be converted to ‘Qt for Device Creation Professional’ licensees. As illustrated in the table above, the new licenses will give subscription license holders added features at no extra cost and will simplify our developer offering significantly. Existing licenses will be automatically converted to the new version through autorenewal at the end of their license terms, and many of the new capabilities will become available immediately via the Qt Maintenance tool.
Need more information? Find all the details on the features included in the different editions here and information about pricing here.
Qt Design Studio license updates
We are going to release Qt Design Studio 3.0 soon. Commercial licenses will be made available in two editions.
- Qt Design Studio Professional
- Qt Design Studio Enterprise
The Qt Design Studio Professional license offers all the tools for user interface design, editing, animations, and prototyping, also for 3D. The features and functionality match those in Qt Design Studio 2.3, excluding the 3rd party bridge plugins. Designers can buy the license separately, and developers using Qt Creator 6.0 or later versions will have the tool included as part of their developer license.
Qt Design Studio Enterprise is an offering for technical artists and user interface designers. It lets you import designs from leading graphical design tools including Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch and 3D elements from Maya, Modo, Blender, to name a few. We will introduce more value-added features this year, empowering designers to create beautiful user interfaces.
Updates to terms and conditions based on customer feedback
You have told us that the requirement to have a valid developer subscription license to distribute your products is hindering you, and we have listened! We have decided to remove this requirement to protect your investment in Qt licenses.
Previously, our license agreements did not allow customers to distribute applications without a valid developer license. These terms were intended to give you the ability to address security and maintenance issues and update your products. However, based on your feedback, these limitations are now lifted for licenses purchased under the Qt License Agreement (Version 4.4) released today. Although no longer required, The Qt Company still strongly recommends maintaining at least one valid developer license subscription for security fixes and maintenance of your software.
There are also other changes in the Qt License Agreement 4.4: We have added The Qt Company’s Quality Assurance (QA) tools to the agreement. The QA tools are products we added to the Qt portfolio through the acquisition of Froglogic in 2021. Squish, Test Center, and Coco are now covered by a single license agreement along with the designer and developer licenses. This change does not impact the terms or pricing for the QA tools but makes the contract structure simpler.
Furthermore, we have aligned the liability period with the subscription term. In earlier versions of the license agreements (version 4.3.x or earlier), the Qt liability period was limited to 12 months regardless of the purchased license term. Now the liability period follows the duration of your subscription.
Existing customers with signed agreements do not get the benefits of the new agreement automatically as we cannot unilaterally make changes to contracts. Please contact your account manager or make a contact request if you would like to discuss an upgrade to the License Agreement version 4.4.
Benefits of the simplified portfolio and licensing
Qt customers have provided us with plenty of feedback on our license structure, terms, and conditions. We have put much effort into simplifying and consolidating our product offering.
The changes will make it easier to understand our offering and do business with The Qt Company. Existing customers will benefit from consolidating features under fewer different license types.
More details of the simplified portfolio are documented in the Frequently Asked Questions www.qt.io/faq/overview about the commercial licensing on www.qt.io/pricing. And if you have questions or comments, please contact us or comment below!
All I want is to have the option to pay 5% of my revenue, like Unreal Engine does. These upfront payments are awful.
I'm sorry to hear that. Have you considered the Small Business License? It's only approximately 10% of a full AD Enterprise license: https://www.qt.io/pricing/qt-for-small-business
Honest Question here, Don't you think you will attract much more developers with the option to pay 5% of the app revenue?For this option you could limit the support to "installation support" and sell support licenses too.I have proposed Qt to a few projects already and the fact we had to pay upfront was always the deal breaker
Also, you could have specified that the small business license was still a thing. Is the small business license also exempt of the distribution licenses ?
The Small Business License renewal was waiting for this change to go out of the pipeline first. Current thinking is that we will be updating the Small Business Licenses later this spring based on Qt for Device Creation Professional.
It does indeed sound like you have listened in some areas: removing the threat that developers would have to keep paying thousands each year to keep distributing an older product. Most companies would go further and say you can carry on using the last version in your support period (just without any support or updates).
You don't seem to have listened on price though. I can't recommend this at work as requests for annually recurring costs of $70k+ (before any additional cost to "allow" moving from GPL development) would fall on deaf ears... especially as Qt improvements seem focused on QML and embedded use, which we don't need. For personal / hobby development, the price is far too high: even the small business licence feels steep (and I don't have a registered business so would not be eligible).
When an MSDN subscription can be negotiated by large business for £250 annual subscription getting you a comprehensive development environment (and test licenses for all their software), paying 10x more than that for some UI widgets does not seem like value. Microsoft wouldn't charge a business more for wanting to give them money (vs. moving from community editions).
I assume the current business model is working for you, but it isn't for me. There are other models out there that might encourage wider small-scale usage, such as mine.
Restored from unfortunate deletion: Small Business License is not suitable for "indie" developers which develops on their free time and want to publish free or low price application (for iOS for example), without publishing the code source and without all the complexity of knowing what you can do or not with the LGPL license which is sometime insane to understand.…. Those developers does not have resources to pay for 500+$ each years to do what they
likeare passionnated about. Most of those developers support Qt by just using it andbetaalpha testing it for you, freely, on their free time so you can sell your product. So I think the minimum Qt can do is offer a FREE community version of Qt, same as the commercial one, without burden of GPL or LGPL licensing. You can safely assume a limit of 50000S per year for such license and then after that offer a 5% fee on product price as Unreal Engine does. If you really want to listen to your community you can do that. So no, Small Business License is not suitable for now.As head of engineering for a medium sized medical device company that delivers software (for free) through the mobile App stores, I have to say when Qt announced their new licensing terms last year, it was a shock to both myself, my team, and our lawyers that Qt would add a perpetual clause for distribution of software built with Qt.
For those unfamiliar with medical device regulations, there are stringent guidelines that one must follow in order to market a product in a particular jurisdiction, most notably of late is EU's new MDR Regulation which replaces the older MDD (both based on ISO standards). The new MDR increases the level of detail required to be reported for all aspects of medical device design and production, and it is no simple task to actually get a device cleared (most companies require a dedicated regulatory team of a few people to do so - or you pay expensive consultants). In any case, the new MDR adds specific clauses around software lifetime, which at first seems strange, since software should just 'work' if the hardware behind is still operable. However, when you look at it closer, it makes sense, since technologies go obsolete so quickly, operating system support waxes and wanes depending on the major player (MS, Apple, Google, etc), and security really needs to be a top priority in all software and medical device design nowadays - security is essentially classified into the safety and effectiveness of devices. These are all design details that must be substantiated to the notified body (the auditor in charge of your account in the EU) in order to clear your device for the market (some audits take 2 weeks and dig into all aspects of design, production, etc).
So when Qt announced there is actually a lifetime in which you can distribute your software, it's obviously a no-brainer that a company building medical devices should immediately move away from Qt or risk having their devices become inoperable (ie. forced to pull software from the App stores), leaving (in our case), tens of thousands of clinicians shit-out-of-luck, and hundreds of thousands of patients left at risk with no diagnostic or treatment solution that they have come to depend on. One of my major projects for 2022 was to redevelop our software using Flutter, which is honestly much simpler for most developers, but will lack of course many modules that Qt supports, forcing us into native land most likely a lot more.
Today's announcement is a step in the right direction, which will now allow me to reevaluate our options, but confidence is waning in how Qt is handling their licensing changes so nonchalantly. Do I want to pay for Qt because it offers a great feature set and covers a broad spectrum of platforms? Absolutely! Do I want to risk my entire business and potentially threaten patient's lives by silly software clauses? Of course not.
Please do us a favor and get proper feedback from all the spectrums of businesses that use Qt before making decisions like the one made last year.
Thank you for your feedback.
To help support this customer’s effort for medical sector business requirements, Qt provides documentation and transparency into our development process, product performance, and internal validation and testing by request. The types of documentation we provide include but are not limited to Qt’s Quality System, Qt’s development process and proof of internal testing, Source code, QA practices, Test reports, etc. We will work on the documentation together with our customers.
There are no changes in support policy; it is the same it has been for a long time. We support regular feature releases for one year and LTS releases for three years. If our customer needs longer support for any release, they should subscribe to Extended Support. We still have customers getting support for releases released more than ten years ago, e.g., Qt 4.8, through Extended Support. These are always customer specific cases and best handled through Qt Sales.
This change on distribution rights should be is a positive thing for customers; we no longer mandate you to have a subscription to distribute an application. We will still recommend maintaining a developer license as it will ensure you have continuous access to Qt support, tools and updates and should you need to do emergency fixes and updates to your own products you are fully equipped to do so.
If you need more information please get in touch with Qt Sales. Or me, I’ll be there also helping.
One Last comment from me about this. Qt is a wonderful framework, it comes with everything one needs to write applications for any platform from embedded to the Web. It makes c++ much more user friendly and in my opinion lowers the barriers to c++ software development for non c++ developers.
But I really don't get why they want to keep a different license model than the mainstream cross plateform application development framework. There are a lot more hobby/indie devs nowadays who wants to develop an app in their free time. Question to Qt, why would these devs choose Qt over let say flutter? I understand Qt wants to focused on embedded devices for big companies, but what would you lose by offering a license based on royalty fees for small businesses?
My proposition, taking into consideration that Qt seems to be keen on keeping their expensive licences for big companies :
-Small business and hobbyist : free up to 50k of revenue. Beyond that, 5% of the revenue up to 250k where they have to pay a one time fee of 3k and 5% of the revenue . Yearly support licenses can be purchased for 1k and should be advertised.
Big Companies : One non recurring 3K payments (Current prices) and 5% of revenue. Support licenses can be purchased for 1k per year.
It's not perfect but it would (in my humble opinion) make Qt much more mainstream and attack more devs.
Good points, thanks. I forwarded this to the respective business owner.
This is not simpler, just stupid. There's a new license now that costs >3000$ a year - but without support? Are you kidding? What's wrong with you guys?
Moi (Finnish for Hi!)
I do understand your point on pricing the Qt AD Professional. The value of a commercial Qt license goes well beyond support services. Customers benefit from immediate access to Long Term Support releases, patent and IPR indemnification and protection, ability to keep all code closed, benefits of exclusive commercial-only software, possibility to create locked down solutions, etc., to name a few.
Also, we have a special pricing tier for qualifying small business customers. We do offer both monthly and annual payment plans through our webshop. And there is free of charge license for those who are willing to comply with the open source GPLv3 and LGPLv3 terms and conditions.
You can get in touch with me santtu.ahonen@qt.io directly to discuss this further. Would like to understand better what you would need in your particular business case to succeed with Qt.
Fun fact: The LTS releases were available until last year. You locked them down. That's not a law of nature but a business decision. You replaced perpetual licenses available until 2 years ago with term / subscription licenses for the same price. The small business licensing, if you qualify, is nothing but a trap, constantly threatening to increase your licensing costs by a factor of 10 if you hit the revenue limit. Locked down solutions are not possible with AD licenses anyway (because locking down would be a device, and even then tivoization is for "User Products" only). I was a Qt customer and I'm very glad I'm not anymore. The Qt Company is by no means a reliable business partner and this "license simplification" and your FUD spreading is just another reason why.
Thanks for coming back.
The trend for the whole software industry is to move towards the subscription model. Business-wise one cannot stay behind. The LTS access and move to subscription model are business decisions. You are correct on the tivoization, that is not relevant for Qt for Application Development use cases, that was my bad.
As I stated in another reply, we are in process of looking into the small business licenses and whether the current model needs tuning. Thus we would like to hear also your views on this, if you think this is in your alley. Please ping me at santtu.ahonen@qt.io and we can talk more about the details.
No thanks. I wasted way too much time and money with the Qt Company already. I use that time now to convince others NOT to become your customers and switch to other frameworks or LGPL Qt, hoping for a fork in the foreseeable future.
Technical Support should be an option. It should not be included. This type of support has a cost for the Qt Company, while some Qt users don't need it.
It effectively is an option with the two bands for application development: $302 per month without support vs $329 per month... so an "option" price of $27 per month. Rather than support (which should be standard), I'd prefer as an option something that would make the prices significantly different, e.g. would assuming your own IRP + Patent protection reduce the cost by $100 a month? If someone can afford $300 a month I imagine they can afford $330 a month.
5% revenue ist completely out of question for anybody than an individual dev.
With the current offer we recieved = basically doubling costs with the subscription model for us to be able to get Qt6 without any further benefits (QML is not needed). Yes, things get more expensive everywhere, but not at such a rate.
Support also seems to be on decline (several bugs open, one got "out of scope").
Sad, very sad.
Ok well then how about 5 % of the revenue from 50 K up to 200 K and then yearly subscription for anything above That ?
Sounds good. Epic games also does not monetize if you are earning less than 1 million $/year:
Like the QtCompany could do the same, but I guess 1 million is a bit much :D
We're on the same ship, costs doubled with no further benefits since we don't do automotive or embedded. We're seriously considering an alternative to Qt now.
As others have mentioned, please reconsider the Small Business License. It should be free for individuals making less than 50k per year and the current price of 500 for 50k-250k per year. The current licensing model pushes away individuals developers and creates a bad reputation which in turn inevitably hurts your business in the long term. The Qt community really needs independent developers to a create a bigger community, especially around Qml and Qt Quick. It is very important that you revamp Desktop and mobile platforms support, which has been stagnant for quite sometime (e.g. Qt Quick Controls 2 have barely changed over the last few years). In light of recent Flutter announcements and support for Desktop platforms, Qt should make itself more appealing to hobbyists.
Many App-Developers can not pay 3000 Dollars and more for SDKs like QT per year. QT is a genial tool especially for making apps for IOS and Android in one source code, but not for this price. There are many one man shows how can pay already their development live. For this guys you made "small business model" and now 2 years later after they used QT and spend many time in developing and testing in QT all this time is wasted, because you promised us that you feel with us (you write this on your homepage: https://www.qt.io/pricing/qt-for-small-business). Indie model comes, Indie model goes, Small business comes, small business goes. You play with our time. Thats not good. Please think this guys, they may become some time "Big business" and can pay 3000 Dollars and much more for your QT. Looking foreword for review of business models.
So basically you removed my comment because I proposed that you offer a more suitable license for indie developers ? Is this how Qt is managing his community now ?
I traced this incident down and it was a pure mistake by one of our developers removing spam on this Commento platform. Unfortunately, once a message is removed there is no way to bring it back, I would restore it if possible. Luckily we have a screenshot of your comment (as we paid attention to it) and it is not lost. In other words, we do not moderate or delete these messages except for off-topic spam.
If you want to discuss this incident further my email is santtu.ahonen@qt.io.
You had good ideas for the small business licenses model. As we are evaluating and renewing also this model would you be interested in discussing your idea further?
Thanks for sending me back the screenshot, I restored the comment.
I just sent you an email.
I'm not an entrepreneur, but a wage software engineer. Also, I am probably much more sympathetic to the values of strict GPL licenses than to the tricks like tivoization and survival in a consumer-centric environment (but I could be just poorly informed about that topic).
My dreams of better software development are related to non-profit foundations and support from communities. I am wondering, how much the better development of the framework could be related to operating systems, programming languages, and compilers (and those, in turn, to hardware developers), and not to the applied software communities and end-users directly.
I am probably very naive and could be wrong, but I still wanted to share my thoughts. Maybe this is not a better place to discuss such topics. Would be happy to receive any sources to get familiar with.
So I am quite interested in the licensing challenges but less in terms of appliance or rules, more in terms of genesis and trends.
Anyway, I understand that the topic is very complex. I wish Qt success as a unique tool of its kind.
I've tried to reach any of Qt sales rep to discuss about purchasing Qt license (Small Business plan) four times during last few months (at the end of 2021 and in the beginning of 2022) using contact form, feedback email and Twitter messages) without any success/answer. Perhaps there is anybody from The Qt Company who can talk to me and answer my questions? Or individual software developers are not important for The Qt Company at all?