June and summer discounts: join DO4 camp!

We're ready to start DataObjects.Net promotional campaign, and as frequently happens, it starts from pricing. Read this post till the end - we're providing huge discounts in June, but expect your involvement in exchange.

Price & licensing policy changes

This summer prices:

- Personal license: 299 USD (no changes)

- Internal license: 495 USD (-100 USD)

- SMB license: 995 USD (-1000 USD)

- Enterprise license: please request a qoute.

- Upgrade subscription: 50% of the license cost. To order it, you must order the original license with DOUPGRADE discount coupon code. Note that it's applicable only if your exising subscription isn't expired - it expires in 1 year form the first purchase; each purchased upgrade subscription adds 1 more year.

- Support subscription: now included into the cost of license.

- Implementation assistance and general consulting: 320 USD/day.

Discounts in June

First of all, we provide 50% discount on almost anything related to DO4, including:

- Licenses: they cost 150/248/498 USD in June. Quote for Entrprise license is provided by request.

- Upgarde subscriptions: 90/149/299 USD in June (so here the discount is 40%)

- Implementation assistance and consulting: 160 USD/day! This price will be definitely left intact till the end of summer.

Coupon code: JDDO4 - right now it is already included into all order pages.

Huge discounts for the people helping us

The conditions listed in this section will remain intact at least till the end of summer.

1. Promotion help discount: additional 50%.

Applicable to new license purchases only. You promise us to statisfy one of the following requirements during 1 month after your purchase:

1) You start or join, and further - maintain 3 different discussions on such developer's web site or forum as stackoverflow.com (it must be for .NET developers, and be well-known either worldwide or in your country).

The duscussions must be related to DO4 - its particular or upcoming features. We don't expect it must be fully positive - it must be simply honest. And there should be links to our wiki, blog or DO4 section on our web site.

2) If you maintain a well-known blog (well-known - of course, relatively - e.g. in your city; ideally, there must be >100 subscribers), you can publish 2 posts related to DO4 in it. Again, with your honest opinion and with links to us.

Please send the links to such discussions or posts to us - at least, as a proof you accomplished your part of contract ;) We'll join the discussion, if it will be necessary.

If you already did something similar, please notify us, and if we'll confirm the conditions listed here are satisfied, feel free to use the coupon code for this dicount.

As you see, we provide additional 50% discount (= 75% now) in exchange for several hours of your help. The final prices with this discount are:

- Licenses: 75/124/244 USD in June, or 150/248/498 USD later. Coupon code:JDDO4POSTER. Note that you can use it right now, but this implies your agree with the above conditions.

2. Contributor licenses: free SMB \ Enterprise licenses with lifetime upgrade and support

We're ready to provide free licenses, if you'd like to help us to develop or promote the product. What can be done to get a free license:

a) Significantly help us to develop some part of DO - for example:

- SQL DOM / storage provider for the database we don't support yet, or some notable part of it

- Sample application (currently we'd prefer good samples for ASP.NET or ADO.NET data services / Silverlight) or some notable part of it

- Useful tool (anything you miss ;) ) or some notable part of it

- Some other part we're planning to implement.

Expected complexity: if it took more than 10 full-time days, and we accepted the result, we'll definitely provide such a license. But other cases are discussable - we're ready for any proposals like this.

Obviously, it's necessary to discuss your plan with us before starting the implementation.

b) Promote DO4 at your local .NET, ALT.NET or similar user group - by making 1.5 hour overview of it there. You can choose any particular part you want, but ideally it should be based on our videos or on our own presentation of DO (will appear in June).

c) Do anything you want comparable to a) or b) by its effect. In fact, we expect you'll spend ~ 1-2 weeks on this, and the result of this will be attractive for DO users.

Remarks

As you may find, our goal for this summer is to grow up the community around DO4. Prices and earnings don't really matter for us.

But you may ask:

Why are you asking to pay something at all? The reason is simple: paid money is one of factors making things precious for you. We expect they'll make our simple "promo agreements" more important for both sides.

Why now? Because we feel the product is fully ready to be shown to much wider audience. Right now it can do more than e.g. currently available version of Entity Framework. But I hope by the end of summer it will be capable to simply smash it by the set of its built-in features.

Ok, of course I fully understand it won't be easy to compete with EF. But imagine, if EF would be shipped by someone else rather than Microsoft. I admit it would be really hard to get a big niche on ORM scene with its design. Really, they're providing features almost identical to NHibernate, but packed into "Microsoft way" box. It's really hard to identify what's new there. I'd also say this is dangerous for NHibernate as well.

I feel we're combining something very good both from open source and commercial development by running this campaign. I hope it will help to involve the people. Our purely commercial promo campaign will follow shortly - we'll be spending almost 5 times more on advertisements starting from the next week (I'm waiting for completion of a set of vital changes on our web site & Wiki). But your help is more important - just rumors, posts and articles make such products really famous.

So I suggest you to join our community right now. Together we'll go forward much faster. Ask yourselves:

- What commercial ORM is as open as DO4? We'd say even non-commercial are less open. Open source, availability under GPL, public issue tracker, open plans, Wiki that can be edited by you, possibility to contribute.

- Do you expect EF will ever run on open source platform? DO4 will definitely run on Mono in observable future.

- Is there any chance of getting DO4 development stopped during the nearest years, if we were ready to spend 2.5 years on developing this new version?

- Does DO4 differ from competitors? Even the current feature set shows it is. Architecturally it's completely new. Such schema upgrade layer, support for index storages, built-in IMDB, integrated query engine, upcoming sync - who else have these features?

- What features are expected in near future? There are tons of them on the way. You may find the product you see now, although being solid, shows a huge foundation for upcoming features. And that's cool, because the baby is just 2 week old! Ok, I know, but the pregnancy was long ;)

- Are we devoted to DO4? You must feel it worth much more than just money for us. It is a part of our image and reputation.

- Can you rely on it and on us? I hope, yes - taking into account above, as well as the experience (including support incidents) we've got during previous years of work on 1.X-3.X.

Join DO4 camp!

P.S. Even if you already have a license, think about writing something good about us ;)