Hi,
I have been a mendix developer for over 3 years now. In that time i have come to love Mendix as a tool for building quick web apps and i am always amazed at the versatility and adaptability of Mendix as a service.
However, i cannot create any mendix apps for my own personal clients outside of my day job as i cannot afford the mendix licences for my apps.
Although mendix does provide us with a free sandbox environment for each app, its performance and users are limited. In addition many clients i have offered to host in sandbox strongly dislike the Resuming app message shown when the app has gone to sleep.
As such i would love a cheaper licencing option, which could be similar to sandbox apps in performance and users, but do not shut down. Additionally it could be billed in a manner similar to cloud foundry or pivotal web services run their pricing, billing apps for the resources they need and allowing to scale up an apps resources such as memory and Storage dynamically.
Yes i agree, currently a single cloud node would require my entire salary to run for a single month. Completely unaffordable to small scale businesses and freelance developers.
Its sad because mendix is such a powerful tool for development and yet i cant use it for apps outside of my day job.
Mendix's price list is unreasonably expensive. Not only personal use but also a small company cannot pay for that price. Small companies may pay up to US$2,000/year for this kind of service, I think.
Ideas:
1) The cheapest is: AWS, Azure or Bluemix's US$1.712/hour --- where you can stop it whenever you want.
2) Mendix free: You may set up another server to wake up Mendix every ten minutes by accessing its top page
3) On AWS, Azure or Bluemix, use an external DB to administrate over 50 or any number of users, and use deeplink module for multiple applications on one single account.