Ionic Pro (Update on coming Ionic Cloud changes)

Appflow
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Matt just sent out an email to Ionic Cloud / apps.ionic.io users. You probably all got, one needs an account to post in the forum here, but I still quote it so we can talk about it here:

Hi,

A few weeks ago we posted a blog post talking about upcoming changes to the Ionic Cloud suite of services. To sum it up, we will be releasing a revamp of Ionic Cloud soon to be introduced as Ionic Pro. This new update will bring a powerful new git-based development process to Ionic developers that works closely with new and improved versions of our Live Update Service, Native Binary Packaging, Ionic View App, (a brand new feature) Runtime Error Reporting, and more. We can’t wait to show you our vision for how apps should be built, shared, and deployed.

As we roll out our new Ionic Pro developer experience in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be making several important changes to Cloud. These changes may cause disruption to your workflow so please read the following carefully.

New Plans & Pricing

Ionic’s long term success and stability relies on building a strong commercial layer on top of our open source products. In order to do so, we have made the tough decision to no longer offer free versions of our Ionic Package, Deploy, and Push services.

Of course, Ionic Framework is, and will always be, 100% MIT open source and free to use. We’re also introducing a new Community tier that allows anyone to try out the Pro dashboard and share app versions with View (more on that below).

Pricing for Ionic Pro will start at $49/mo for our Developer tier and will support unlimited apps. Teams and organizations can benefit from additional collaboration features, along with other premium services, by moving up to the Team plan for $169/ mo per team member with annual billing.

Existing Cloud customers will be grandfathered into the Ionic Pro Developer tier with their current pricing and billing.

Access to existing Cloud services

Access to the legacy Ionic Cloud dashboard and API services will be available to existing Cloud users until January 31, 2018.

If you’re on the free version of Cloud, you’ll still be able to use the existing Cloud services during this period. Starting 2018, you would need to upgrade to a Pro plan to continue using them.

Ionic View

We’ve spent a lot of time turning Ionic View into the best testing solution for mobile in the market. In order to continue to invest in the product, we are making a few important changes to Ionic View.

The latest version of Ionic View will feature public and private sharing. Sharing private apps to testers, clients, and other users will require an Ionic Pro account. Public apps, like those featured on the Ionic Market and developers that are okay sharing their app with the community, can be created and shared for free.

Apps uploaded using ionic upload will not be available in the app and will have to move to the new git-based deployment system to use Ionic View.

Along with this, our new View app will have more native plugins, improved sharing features (deeplinking, tester accounts, etc.), as well as deeper integration into the new Ionic developer workflow.

Ionic DevApp

With the changes to Ionic View, we are excited to roll out a totally new app we think you’ll love: the Ionic DevApp. The DevApp will dramatically reduce the effort required to test apps on a real device. Instead of configuring native SDKs and dependencies, just install the DevApp, run ionic serve, and the app automatically discovers and loads the app (as long as it’s on the same wifi network).

The DevApp is our attempt to separate the features developers need to quickly and easily test apps on a real device from those intended to make sharing and testing easy that the new Ionic View excels at.

The Ionic DevApp will be totally free to use for all Ionic developers.

Ionic Auth

As of January 31, 2018, we will no longer provide the Ionic Auth user authentication service. We understand there’s been some frustration about this, and Max posted some comments on his recent blogpost that explain our thinking here. In short, we don’t see a future for Auth in the Ionic services suite, and there are plenty of alternatives out there that we think will be better for our users in the long run.

Ionic Push

We’re working to migrate Ionic Push to the new Ionic Pro experience, but for a time following Ionic Pro’s release, Push will only be accessible through the legacy dashboard and API. We are working on a new upgrade to Push that will make it more scalable and easier to use across mobile and web.

Ionic Deploy

Our Ionic Deploy system will use a new concept called Environments to manage your deployments. This will use our new git workflow, ionic upload will no longer function for deploys.

A new Deploy native plugin will also be released that will remove the need to program anything manually in your app to use the service.

Ionic Creator

If you’re on an Ionic Pro Team plan, Ionic Creator will now come with your subscription. It will also continue to be offered as a standalone product.

Ionic Creator now supports Ionic Framework 3+ through the export feature, and we are working on a major upgrade to Creator to make it even easier to build fully-featured apps.

Thank you

From all of us at Ionic, we thank you for your continued support. We have been working hard this year taking all of the lessons learned over the last few years to build a platform that we feel adds unique and much needed value to the Ionic developer experience.

We are confident you’ll find that Ionic Pro enables you and your organization to build, test, and deploy apps faster than ever before possible, all while making it easy to work with the 3rd party services you choose.

We understand changes like this can frustrating and disruptive. If you have a major concern or wish to speak with us, please send me an email at matt@ionic.io.

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This all makes sense to me. Auth is probably the biggest issue, and there’s no sense in driftyco being the primary auth provider if they aren’t offering a backend product. DevApp sounds great!

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Yea, I do look forward to all these nifty updates and features. Whilst I do appreciate the focus and drive they are giving the Ionic Cloud/Pro. My only real concern is/will be the tier pricing plans. I know we wont find out more till later, but when there is only a very small team involved and only tend to only use Ionic now and then (and don’t get major overhead return with costs from clients), it does get into the grey area of justifying the price(s) and in no way do I expect it to be a ‘free’ product. But the initial price plans to make me feel a little uncomfortable. Just saying, not trying to start a war :slight_smile:

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I second your on the pricing bit.

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Our company started evaluating Ionic as a platform of choice but with this new development and sharp increase in pricing for Development teams we will probably not be able to afford this service.

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Is the Developer tier only for a single person to access Ionic services, or can a team access services for the same apps?

I absolutely agree that the Ionic team need to make some money for Ionic Cloud to continue to exist… but $169/m per person for the Team plan is very expensive. It literally has me wondering if it’s a typo, that it was meant to say $16 or $19??!

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Also slightly worried about the prices, all I use it for is Push messages. We’ll see, there’s still a semi long time until 2018 :slight_smile:

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I am just a single developer with one app using push and deploys. I think the $49/month is a bit too expensive for a case like mine. I hope they will consider creating a plan that fits a “small” developer better and I totally understand that I have to pay for a service like ionic cloud (it’s impressive)

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In a Slack I’m in two points were discussed: What is this “Community tier” that is mentioned and then not elaborated on? And does anything of this affect the ionic cordova resources command that also needs a login since CLI 3.x? I sent both questions to Matt and will post the answer here when I get one.

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I was wondering if the realtime updating ( Ionic Deploy ) is a premium option or not… ? I need to pay for it ?

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Yes, seems so. In the email it explicitly says that they will no longer offer a free version of Ionic Deploy.

But there are free alternatives out there with Code Push from Microsoft (I think).

And of course, this might change based on user feedback until 2018 - that’s why we are posting here, right? :wink:

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Hey everyone! Thanks for all the great questions and feedback, and I appreciate the civility as well.

The Community tier is going to include public channels in Ionic View (so you can continue to share what you’re making publicly if you’d like), but all other features will require at least a Developer tier account which starts at $49/m.

However, one major pricing difference is that it is no longer per app (before it was $20 per app, now it’s $49 for unlimited apps), so if you’re playing around and making lots of smaller projects, it will save you some money :slight_smile:

As for the pricing of our Team plan, if you’re a smaller team and don’t need to do things like access management, etc, you can probably get away with sharing one developer account login.

As for ionic cordova resources I consider that to be part of our standard local development tools, which will continue to be free.

Feel free to hit me up personally at matt@ionic.io with any other questions related to the pricing and feature changes!

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Perfect, thanks for the quick reply. You can ignore my mail then :wink:

Sounds fine to me.

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Hello Matt

Thats one way of seeing it. You could also say that if you only have one app, you have more than doubled the price. Not everyone is making “lots of smaller projects” :slight_smile:

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Since Auth is deprecated you guys should really change the documentation at https://docs.ionic.io/services/auth/ to include a disclaimer that this is going away and perhaps have some alternatives listed there. Could save people new to Ionic a lot of time. Would have saved me a bunch of time had I known.

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Is it really $169/m per person for the Team plan, or was it a typo? I’m sorry but I have to ask, because that is seriously expensive. I work for a large consultancy, and even for us (very much your target market) $2k+ per year, per dev is not going to fly - I want to support Ionic financially so it can continue to grow and evolve… but that pricing isn’t realistic.

Ionic and Ionic Package are what make Cordova development viable for us, but if this pricing is for real we’d probably consider moving away from Cordova altogether and switching to Xamarin.

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Hey All,

Quick update. We know the Auth sunsetting is frustrating and will cause extra work. There’s no way around saying that it sucks and we know it.

However, we have started talking with a number of leading auth vendors to find official migration paths. It’s my sincere hope we can do something somewhat automated that will result in minimal downtime, but I can’t guarantee that yet.

Long term, we want to make it easy to use 3rd party services much in the way that Heroku does, and we realized this is an opportunity to get the ball rolling on that.

That’s all I have right now, we will have more info once we know more.

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I am happy to pay the monthly cost but removing the auth service is very frustrating. I only implemented authentication using ionic auth 3 weeks ago. As mentioned above, the docs for the ionic auth really need to have some type of disclaimer.

@max an official migration path would be very useful.

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As a small team working we have 2 apps and only use the PAckage Service. Our apps make no money. The irony was that I switched from Telerik AppBuilder (around $40) a month to Ionic because of the attractive pricing for small teams. This price is just too expensive for me to justify. We would probably be able to pay up to $20 just to use the PAckage feature, otherwise we’ll have to find alternatives. (I understand the need to charge to make money but I think we’re missing a pricing tier)

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This all sounds great. Any idea when me might see some of these? Beta timeline? I am particularly interested in The DevApp!