The previous blog post already mentioned something called Pro Account. As promised, it's time to elaborate on that topic, since it's available as of today!
NOTE: This blog post is outdated. Go to our Pricing page for our current tiers and benefits!
To get over with the specs, the whole Pro Account package encompasses the following things:
- Pro Add-ons — Get a license to use any and all Vaadin Pro Add-ons.
- Knowledge Base — Answers to many common problems.
- Feature Voting — Get your favorite thing implemented sooner.
- Bugfix Priority — Found a disturbing bug? We'll fix it within days for you.
- Security Alerts — Be among the first one to get security warnings, should some arise.
- Custom Builds — No need to wait for an official version anymore.
- Support — A means to get a hotline directly to the Vaadin developers.
In a nutshell, Pro Account is a collection of premium services to complement Vaadin and the surrounding free services for the community.
There's an exhaustive explanation to what Pro Account really is on the site itself, but as a developer, there are a couple of things that interest me specifically:
Feature Voting
This will give you, the developers, more control over what Vaadin will become, and what it will look like in the future.
In all simplicity, your account gets one additional vote each month. These votes can then be spent voting on tickets. Our development team will then take the top voted tickets into high consideration when they're planning on what to do next.
The nice thing here is that you get your votes back in case your requested ticket is closed without being completed. Also, nothing stops you from hoarding your votes until you find a must-have feature, and simply dump all your votes on one single ticket…
Bugfix Priority
There's nothing more irritating than relying on a 3rd party library, and then finding a showstopper bug that you, in all reality, can't do anything about, other than avoiding to use that feature altogether, or coming up with a really clever (and linearly unstable) workaround. We've felt this pain with other libraries too, and we want to avoid passing it onwards.
This is somewhat similar to the Feature Voting, but for bugs, and much nicer: You only get to prioritize one defect at time and it is guaranteed that within two days someone from the Vaadin Team is assigned to work on that bug.
Support
Since I'm already in the Vaadin team, I more or less have been benefiting from this service all my time here. But as a Pro Account subscriber, you will get even more than what I have got.
On an hourly charge, the Vaadin Team will answer any and all questions you have about Vaadin or something even loosely related. But in addition to that, if you want, we'll review your code, we'll pair program with you over Skype, we'll even make changes to Directory add-ons on your request, even if we didn't write them. And we do even more than that – just name it, and we'll probably do it.
This is the only thing that costs something on top of the Pro Account subscription. But with this kind of support, you never have to face a brick wall when working with Vaadin.
Endnote
Lastly, I just want to underline the fact that none of this takes away anything you currently have. The forums still remain as the most awesome Vaadin community in the world. There's still the Skype and IRC channel around, and they're not going away.
All this is being offered to you, if you want that little bit extra VIP treatment.