I’m coding my app with Expo for a couple of months now and really do enjoy it and I would like to say right away that I am extremely thankful for such a wonderful environment. The amount of code I have written for my app, the investments I have made into it and the fact that I actually want to make it to make a noteworthy impact led me to some thoughts.
First of all as Expo is entirely free of charge and even building on the servers is free of charge raises some concerns with me. There might of course be noble investors or donors for Expo, but I must admit I would sleep better I I’d know that Expo would make some money.
Here’s my point: I would be willing to pay $10-$20 per month for a professional Expo subscription that allows me to build on Expo servers and use it’s infrastructure. My condition for me doing so would be the implementation of In-App purchase including subscriptions (this thing right here: In App Purchases | Voters | Expo).
If you guys would allow me to make money, then I would be willing to pay you guys as well.
Has that ever been on the table or how does Expo plan to make money?
I completely agree with you. I would totally pay $10-20 USD each month to use this great environment. However what about students, teachers and people that just want to test this out. If it is going to be a paid subscription one day the user base will decrease also, and that’s not good for the community.
Expo has answered questions like these in their FAQ here.
I believe that Expo will remain free for a long time and I support that as long as it is doable.
We think its really important that Expo be free and open source because that’s what makes it more standard and accessible to everyone. For example, these forums have started to become a great resource for people who have questions about how to do X or Y or Z with Expo. That wouldn’t be as true if you had to pay to use it.
That said, we do get requests all the time for various paid services and are taking a serious look at some things like that.
If you do need support, we have some dedicated support plans we offer that we charge money for. Get Support — Expo
Re: IAPs specfiically: The biggest reason we haven’t implemented IAPs yet is that its very hard to implement them in a way that would work in the Expo Client, which is the way that most users do development with Expo. For example, to set up IAPs on iOS, you need to sign the Paid Applications Agreement and set up your banking and tax information with Apple, and then configure stuff around the app in Xcode. It’s definitely something that we know users care about and is on our radar screen. If you like, you can add a comment or a vote to the feature request here: In App Purchases | Voters | Expo.
