Polychart.js: An Interactive Charting Library

In a world of so many wonderful free open source graphing libraries, it's hard to see any reasonable licensing option for this. It might help if there was a page that listed features that a developer could not accomplish for $300 in flot, highcharts, or ndv3, or other popular options.

Am I the only one who assumed this was for constructing charts of who you're in a relationship with, who they're in a relationship with, etc.?

In no way am I projecting a preference for everything should be free. I specifically said I was willing to pay, but per developer makes no sense to me at all.

I build a commercial product myself that I charge for.

My point is that per-developer licensing doesn't make sense on any level... just because "that's how people have always done it" doesn't make it a good idea and that type of pricing doesn't allow me to compare the cost to the value. Instead of thinking, this product is awesome and I can use it on my 5 sites for $X.. I have to think, ok I have 20 developers and 5 of them work on site A, 7 on site B and the rest float around so how many people would need to be developing with the library, etc etc.

Right? or am I missing something here and am crazy? which is entirely possible.

Interesting question. So if I use this to display site metrics for me and my team, is that a commercial use? I'm not selling that service but in that example I would be using it to provide a visual indication of how the site is doing which helps me do my job.

Generally pricing isn't particularly challenging, people exchange money for perceived value so identify the value that you add and charge for that.

So places where you might be adding value;

developer training - A common source of value and one which a lot of non-community FOSS members appreciate. So folks who aren't part of the community or know much about anything find it valuable to have someone who will answer their stupid questions in a timely fashion without insulting them. That could certainly be charged on a per-developer level and annually.

data-hoisting - (see what I did there? clever huh?) basically there is value in getting your data from X hosted on Y. So lets say I periodically scrape all of the stock prices for the DJIA and want to provide an interactive chart for that. A data hoisting service would provide a repository for post-processed and chart friendly data. You can price that with visualization support almost on a contract basis.

custom visualizations - there will be people of course who want to visualize something in a way which is unique, consulting services for them can be quite valuable.

ad-sponsored charts - something between hoisting and foisting but there are charts that people "check" very often (like the 5 day weather forecast, or the traffic delays on various freeways). You can certainly create pages which display visualizations of these and also are "sponsored" by an advertiser. The trades of bit coins for example, rent prices by zip codes, basically changing data sets of interest to both a number of people and to people who would like to advertise to people interested in that data.

This is pretty cool, but $300 is a lot to pay, even for commercial use. There are a lot of free client-side charting projects out there. Charts.js was a recent one on HN: http://www.chartjs.org/

While this new one does offer interaction between charts, that wouldn't be too hard to add into other existing free projects that have event systems to hook into.

I'd say $50 - $99 would make it more worthwhile.