I have added a feature request to let us purchase more licenses for Maker’s Edition. I often could do with an HMI for the project I’m making and don’t want to have to either decommission a project I finished for its license or make a Frankenstein project full of little project (assuming each project is even in the same location where this would be viable).
Personally, I would gladly pay $20 for an additional license, especially if it came with some additional features (like the other two forum posts I recently made about removing the licensing popup or about making the license permanent instead of leased.)
You should make a Franken-project.
Personally, I think the availability of this extraordinarily powerful commercial software in a free-but-restricted form is to be praised. That it is spawning whining for more freebies is a shame. And for a product that would otherwise cost ~ $25k, suggesting $20 as a license fee is effectively the same as a freebie.
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suggesting $20 as a license fee is effectively the same as a freebie.
Not at all, Maker's edition is fundamentally aimed at a different market than the full fledged project. Marker's Edition while powerful and worth using, is not equivalent to their $25K flagship that includes vision along with perspective.
I would, in fact, be in favor of Maker's coming with less if it meant I could purchase additional licenses. I want to be paying them something to make better use of this great option for the maker's community. $25 is a fair price point for the market that Maker's Edition is aimed for. Someone would hardly purchase a $35 raspbery pi and then spend $100 or more for a license for Maker's Edition.
I got the $25k by putting Maker’s module list into IA’s pricing tool. No Vision, and no other modules. Granted, Maker has some tag limits, but you’re still talking a commercial license not much less than $25k. If it really is personal use, I’m not seeing the case for extra licenses. And for a product that valuable for free, the network lease requirement seems more that prudent.
Personal use, to me, means you want all of the designs you create to use yourself, in your own home. If you are trying to separate projects so you can isolate something for someone else’s use, you are abusing IA’s generosity.
$25K and yet I can get all the same basic features in Ignition Edge for only $1500. Why the disparity despite so many of the same features? Because they are targeted at two different markets. Likewise Maker’s is aimed at a third market and despite having overlap it’s not equivalent to the $25K full version nor the $1500 edge version.
I am extremely pleased to see Maker’s edition, I requested this very thing close to a decade ago I think. IA choose to make it free and I’m asking to pay for the ability to use it! If that means loosing features then I’m all for it. Honestly a single web client, some serial comms, and some modbus comms and you’ve filled the needs for the vast majority of the maker’s community while at the same time introduced them to the concept of Ignition for automation.
But who’s talking about making things for someone else’s use? There are plenty of uses I personally want to use Maker’s edition for that would benefit (and in some cases require) separating them out into individual products. And there is a whole maker’s community out there that already exists that would jump at a good priced top end that I would love to point them toward Ignition as an efficient means to add a user interface to their projects, but 3 projects is a major limiting factor.
@abishur the only issue with this request is that this isn’t really what Maker is designed to do. It’s geared more towards a server-client architecture.
Also, (IMO) Maker is more of a gift, than geared towards a market. It’s there to educate and persuade people to use the product (by people like me who then rave about it to everyone they meet 
). Adding a price tag to it makes it a commercial product, which then has to be maintained, supported, etc. If its free and maintained by the community its a win for (almost) everyone.
I understand your view, but I don’t think this is the way that Maker is intended to be used.
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