I like Ext JS – the JavaScript framework by Sencha. But does it mean that our enterprise clients will be willing to pay $21K for 10 licenses of the recently released Sencha Complete: Team? It’ll be a hard sell for Sencha that plays in the field where all competing frameworks are free.

Such a hefty price tag may limit the exposure of Ext JS to only those enterprise shops that must use software products that are backed by their vendors and are commercially supported (for extra money, of course). Interestingly enough, Sencha even restricts the access to the evaluation copy of Sencha Complete. You have to have a team of 10 developers to request evaluation copy of this product. How many projects have you seen that had 10 JavaScript developers? Not many, right? It seems that Sencha Complete is meant only for the large enterprises where architecture groups approve Ext JS and Touch as THE framework to use.

I understand where this pricing is coming from though. Sencha as a company has started with some serious financial investments. If I’m not mistaken, more than $50 million were poured into the company over a couple of rounds of financing. Having this pile of cash is great for any software product, and Sencha’s engineers have proven that they can deliver. But there are time to scatter stones and there times to gather them. I guess, these venture capitalists what to see their money grow.

I still remember these expensive IDEs from the 90th, which were priced at $2K a pop. Where are they? I still remember Adobe’s LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) with the extraorbitant license prices that was not able to compete with Adobe’s own open sourced version of this product (BlazeDS). WHere is LCDS now? Do you also see what I see?

As I said, I like Ext JS framework (hopefully it’ll lose some weight in the future versions), and I like Sencha Touch for developing mobile applications. I wish Sencha’s salesmen to be convincing in selling the licenses of Sencha Complete: Team. Our company offers consulting services in development of enterprise Web applications, and Ext JS is one of our frameworks of choice. And the last thing I want is to see the market share of Sencha is diminishing because of the careless pricing policy.