Some of you will no longer want to hear this topic or have the impression that everything has been said and written about it: The runtime. Please forgive me if the subject has already been discussed sufficiently and I haven't noticed it yet, I'm still fresh here.
In fact, the runtime is dead, not much can be expected from Claris and everyone has to find their way around it. And many developers have never needed it, of course. But in personal conversations with other developers i got the impression, that some of them haven't found any good solutions for themselves and want to continue working with the runtimes »until they break«. But in worst case it's not just about the runtime breaking, but also about an entire business model.
At that point i just wanted to ask how many developers are affected by the topic and whether they are interested in an exchange and/or a compilation of solutions/alternatives? (And by that I mean approaches that also go beyond FM, such as new business models or even other development environments.)
Hi Jan, nice to see that you "dived into the soup".
I'm glad you brought up this topic once again because as I told you already on the phone I'm in the exact same situation right now. I have a few thousand clients and my solution costs 199.- EUR (+ tax). Claris offers me FileMaker licenses that cost the same or a little cheaper, depending on how much I will buy.
That's not really an option for me. I'd either earn much less (or nothing) or I would have to increase my price drastically, which would drive away a lot of customers from my solution.
I still haven't made up my mind yet, how to go on from this point. Are there any other developers, that have solved this problem yet?
@MonkeybreadSoftware
Thanks Christian for your thoughts about that. That helps at least little.
Thanks Christian. Sounds very reasonable. The only thing is, the moment Runtimes don't work anymore I don't have a cheap solution for the "Swabian*" customers (like me). But maybe I can cover these clients with a subscription model.
*Swabian: A German population group, infamous for their thrift.
At this point already many thanks for your kind and helpful answers.
It is comforting to see not being alone with this problem (and the Swabian origin).
I realize this is a very OLD thread, and an even older topic. I started in FileMaker with version 3 when I was in the hospitality business. I replaced our Daily Sales tracking Excel worksheet with FileMaker. I replaced the Excel inventory worksheets with FileMaker. I also had a shareware program that I integrated into the workflow for food and beverage costing.
I kept buying the shareware program until the author said TAKE IT. I do not use it anymore. It was a DOS program. I developed my own inventory/costing program. I included features I knew were in a comparable "mainframe" program used in a corporate restaurant chain.
I thought the RUNTIME version of my program would be good to sell to the Mom & Pop restaurants/bars. A single user program was workable. AND could be priced better than the much more expensive programs I had seen. Which was why I developed my own.
With runtimes gone from ver19, what are my options to sell my program to the Mom & Pop. A server and 5 users is overkilll.
@TKnTexas, If you've read through this thread and also read the other threads that are referenced here you'll have a pretty good understanding of the challenges.
Perhaps we can be more helpful if you tell us what options you are considering. After all, the options run from (a) locked in time on a VM running v18 all the way through to (z) rewrite in a different programming language.
