MacCallGrind 2.0: pricing and trialling explained

6th March 2010 0:29:00 by Richard Bennett

You may have noticed that we finally released MacCallGrind 2.0 at the end of February 2010, our Mac callgrind profiling tool. This is our first commercial product under the Aggmedia banner, and personally my first product in almost 15 years. We're pretty stoked to finally get it out.

MacCallGrind 2.0 has had a long 18 month development cycle, due to it being primarily a side project for our company. What started as a freeware side project at version 1.0, has now turned into a fully funded product, with internal development resources allocated to it. We think this is a good thing for MacCallGrind users, and good for all the wishlist features we're hoping to add in the future.

However we have received a few comments about how we approached the 2.0 release, particularly the 1MB open file limit in the trial version, and the US$149 price tag. I'd like to address each of these, try to explain why we chose to do it, and what we're doing about it.

We feel the price comes down to the value gained (lots), the potential market (very small), and the cost of development (a moderate amount), along with consideration of the rest of the profiling tool market. How much value would you gain from using MacCallGrind to tune your software? A couple of hundred page views per minute? An additional 500ms or more off your average page request time? These are high value metrics, and we'd suggest are a bit of a bargain for $149, if your company depends on a high performance web site. We originally considered pricing it at around the $500 mark, which would be more in line with professional development tools for the level of performance software we're targetting, and would better cover the development costs we've put into the product. But we thought the jump from free might be a concern for some people, so we specifically chose a lower price.

The clear majority of users of MacCallGrind are professional software engineers, and due to the nature of code profiling, are a senior software engineer in particular. They either work on a consulting/contract basis for other companies, or work full time for a development company. In the case of a consultant, $149 would be about an hour or two of contracted work time, and for a development company, $149 is fairly trivial for the performance gains being realised.

So we don't feel the price is expensive, on the contrary, we think its pretty cheap. Thus the concern by some people is probably because the previous version was free. Version 1.0 was freeware, and it remains freeware. We've decided to no longer distribute it, but if you have a copy, we're more than happy for you to keep using it for free. There's no obligation for you to upgrade to 2.0 if you don't want to.

The remaining group of users is those working on open source projects. But again, the knowledge to tune performance is that of a professional software engineer, and in most cases they're already doing performance tuning in their paid work. And there's always the free 1.0 version if they already have it anyway.

We had planned to release a "Not For Profit" version of MacCallGrind 2.0, which would be free for use for open source projects, but in the end we decided against having to maintain an additional ongoing development branch. Instead, if you are an open source project which relies on the performance of your code, then please contact us and (at our discretion), we'll give you a free 2.0 license for your open source project. We had always planned on doing this, we just hadn't had a chance to announce it yet.

And finally, the original release of MacCallGrind 1.0 asked users to post a message in our blog to say they're using it. If you did this, or we have spoken with you directly at any time since the original release of MacCallGrind, then you will be receiving a free 2.0 license over the next few weeks. If it doesn't arrive, then please let us know, and we'll make sure it happens.

In summary, we think the price is fairly low for what MacCallGrind 2.0 gives engineering professionals; we have a free upgrade path for open source projects and users of 1.0; and if you still have an issue with the price, then there's always the free options for the Mac like KCacheGrind (under Fink), and the open source Webgrind project. Having said that, we are listening to feedback, and we are looking again at what the price for MacCallGrind should be.

Which brings us to the 1MB trial file size limit. You can download MacCallGrind from our web site, and all its functionality works. The only restriction is that it will only open files up to 1MB in size. Buy a license, and obviously that restriction goes away. We've been active in the performance tuning market for over 20 years, and unfortunately there are unscrupulous engineering consultants who will use trial software tools for their consulting projects, so they don't have to buy the tool. A time limited restriction on MacCallGrind would allow engineers to do their performance tuning with their trial, and then not have to buy the product. This is just the nature of the irregularity of performance tuning unfortunately, and is why we instead switched to using a never ending trial but with a file restriction, so engineers can test it with test code or moderately sized production scripts.

Callgrind files can be quite small, even for long code paths, and while we still think 1MB is enough to trial MacCallGrind's features, we have listened, and have decided to up the limit to 3MB. It will however take us a few weeks to make this happen, so please check back with us later.

If any of this is unclear, or you have any concerns or questions about MacCallGrind, then please contact us. We think MacCallGrind is a good solid product, at a good price point, and we have some great features coming in following releases. But we are listening to your feedback, and are always open to suggestions about how we can make MacCallGrind an even better product.