Dramatic price increase at SquareLine Studio

In spring, I started working on the ESP32 weather station, using the LVGL GUI library for the display. As the project progressed, the structure of the layout became increasingly complex. For this reason, I decided to look for a suitable graphical layout editor. However, it didn't take long to find one, as the developers of LVGL now also offer their own editor, SquareLine Studio.

SquareLine Studio is an integrated development environment for the design, prototyping and development of graphical user interfaces for embedded devices. It is based on LVGL and uses a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate the creation and editing of GUI elements. SquareLine Studio can export platform-independent C code that can be compiled for any device from any manufacturer. 

Since I only need the editor for the development period, but need more widgets than are possible with the Personal license, I opted for the monthly Small Business license. At 19 dollars, this is not exactly cheap, but affordable. The following table shows the costs in spring 2023.

In comparison, Adobe Photoshop only costs me 12 euros per month, IntelliJ Ultimate the equivalent of 17 euros per month. And both programs offer far more functionality in their field. But for a niche product, it's still okay.

At the beginning of October, SquareLine finally sent an e-mail informing us that "some adjustments" would be made to the prices.  The following table shows the new prices for Squareline Studio:

The monthly Small Business subscription was simply discontinued. Perhaps other developers also planned to use the product only for a short period of time. The cost of the annual Small Business subscription has been increased fourfold! In return, the number of widgets was increased from 50 to 150. But if you need more widgets, as I do for the weather station, SquareLine no longer offers an affordable option for makers.

At least for existing customers, however, the prices should not change. Lucky me, I thought. But at the beginning of November I received another email from Squareline. I had to prove that I earned less than 150000 dollars a year. This is the prerequisite for being allowed to use the small business license at all. In principle, this would (unfortunately) not be a problem, but I have absolutely no intention of telling some greedy company my annual income. My license was promptly deactivated a short time later. But that didn't stop Squareline from continuing to charge the monthly subscription fee.

In the meantime, I have finally canceled my license. SquareLine Studio may still be an option for smaller projects, but it is obvious that this company has no interest in supporting larger open source projects. So I will probably go back to manually programming the GUI in the future. SquareLine has chosen to maximize profits while simply ignoring the maker community that forms the backbone of their user base. It's unfortunate that they prioritize short-term financial gain over valuing and supporting this vibrant community.