Why is their no trial of Ruby Motion? That's been the issue for me. Spending $200 just to try something makes NO sense. Seems to me they're hiding something.

Stay with that decision.

It also costs $100/yr to keep updated. I believe HipByte has no plans to introduce a better business model or different tiers of pricing. For contrast Appcelerator & Xamarin both include free tiers and updates for free, only support is paid. RubyMotion is more accurately cloning the iOS dev payment model with annual subscriptions. And they know, you'll want updates as iOS is updated. So they push this over the entire community rather then getting enterprise costumers to pay for a scaling support model.

Wait for mRuby, or just develop in an alternate product.

From the Xamarin site:

> Can I continue to use Xamarin when my subscription expires?

> Yes you can. Your Xamarin license is perpetual. If you choose not to renew your subscription, you will no longer have access to new releases and support, and we will be very sad.

In other words, the Xamarin model is the same as RubyMotion. If you don't pay after the first year, you can continue to build as many apps as you want, you just won't receive any support or new releases.

This is false. Xamarin includes a free tier. You can download it. But yes, after you've opted into pay it's a subscription.

I think subscriptions for support are a great model as they scale. You're paying for help with your solution.

Updates on the other hand only serve to limit & restrict the community.

I would pay the money if it was worth it… Good tools are worth money. I've been using Monotouch and Monodroid since day 1, and it was pretty rocky at the start. There's still a lot of annoying bugs in the bindings on iOS.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Or, in this case, the very real possibility that support staff and development effort would be consumed by the demands of free trial users to the detriment of paying customers...

I just renewed my license and I swear: Never has $200 dollars paid off so many times over. Customer for life.

Makes no sense. Obj-C is compileable, and arguably faster to develop with auto-completion, code checking. There's no cross platform benefits, and it's not free.

RubyMotion is compilable as well, and auto-completion only helps when you're writing code, not when you're going back and re-reading it. Also, it was announced at the end of the RubyMotion conference that additional platforms are on the road map.

...and, as my grandfather always told me, you get what you pay for.

There should a trial