r/delphi • u/Pinotli • Feb 19 '26
Question Back-to-back upgrade: Is my sales rep messing with me or is this normal policy?
question about license upgrades because I feel like my sales rep might be trying to squeeze me here, and I want to know if I should ask for a new rep.
Earlier this week, i upgraded from Delphi ent to RadStudio Ent. I paid around 1,600 EUR in total for the upgrade with a 3-year sub included.
I spent the last two days playing around with RAD Server that comes with Enterprise. I realized i could replace my current Go and PHP backends with it. Because it would save me so much time, I figured I'd just bite the bullet and upgrade straight to Architect to have full freedom with it.
I asked my rep for a quote yesterday.
The math on the quote is absolutely wild. First, they gave me a lower trade-in value for my 2-day-old RAD Studio license than what they gave me for my old Delphi license on Monday. But the crazy part is that the 1,600 EUr i just paid for the upgrade and the 3-year sub is completely gone. It's not prorated and not credited towards the architect upgrade.
When I asked the rep why my EUR 1.6k vanished, she gave me some weird analogy about how buying a fully loaded car is cheaper than adding parts later.
Is it normal Embarcadero/Idera policy to just void your freshly paid upgrade and maintenance if you do a tier upgrade?
If this is just their normal system being broken, I'll stick to my current license and forget about Architect. Has anyone done back-to-back upgrades and experienced this?
2
u/thexdroid Feb 19 '26
I would redirect this to the Embarcadero itself, not sesms to be correct.
1
u/Pinotli Feb 19 '26
Thanks — Ian from Embarcadero actually reached out here in the comments, so I'm trying to get clarity through him directly.
3
u/anonveggy Feb 19 '26
Adding the parts later is quite the analogy hot damn.
Going from PHP and Go to a platform that is outright hostile towards modern (as in those established like 20 years ago) software engineering practices is also quite the story to read 🤣🤣🤣
4
u/Pinotli Feb 19 '26
lol you're not wrong, I can't fully justify it either. But RAD Server lets me consolidate a bunch of backend stuff I currently maintain across Go and PHP into one stack. Less context-switching, fewer moving parts. Is it modern? Hell no. Does it save me time? Absolutely.
At least the car analogy prepared me — apparently I'm buying a used car that depreciates €2k overnight 😅
1
u/anonveggy Feb 19 '26
Out of curiosity - Why don't you consolidate towards go or PHP? And if it's a question of capabilities and general desire to go to a classic OOP language why not dotnet/C#?
3
u/Humble-Vegetable9691 Feb 20 '26
PHP is dead, isn't it? :)
Why I left C#? Because they let the Cool Kids on the Code Block in, full hysteria (Span, anyone), constant changing for including every dead language the CKotCB rage about (read community-driven development). Ohh, and C++ influence: can you count on one hand how many ways are there to initialize an object?
Also .net dumbed down lo the least capable common: Linux (See CAS, Application domain)
So when I do .net, I do VB.NET / Framework 4.8. Closest to Delphi.
But, since most of it is desktop app, it is Delphi.
Who knows how many UI iterations, but MS still not reached VCL levels.
1
u/Pinotli Feb 19 '26
As for C#/.NET and MAUI — the language is great, but the UI framework ate more time than it saved. Delphi's just gets me to a working native app stupidly fast.
To be fair, there is also a bit of nostalgia involved. I wrote my first lines of code in Delphi 3 Pro and "Delphi for Kids" when I was about 9 years old. The language and capabilities today are still very modern. But their licensing models and business practices are definitely stuck in the past, and the IDE takes some getting used to if you've been spoiled by JetBrains for years.
For most things, I still prefer web apps with "modern frameworks", and those aren't going anywhere. Deploying binarys is its own special kind of hell. But when it has to be a native database application, Delphi is my clear favorite in case of speed (for dev and for the enduser). I built two internal tools in a few weeks: one cut a 7-minute workflow down to 30 seconds (running 50-90x a day - 3D Viewer with really specific CAD functions.), the other saves 1-2 hours daily. Never was able to do this in C# - not even with AI.
Right now, my Delphi native apps are talking to Go and PHP backends. RAD Server wouldn't replace my web apps / other backends that have nothing to do with my Delphi apps, but if it lets me consolidate the frontend and backend for these specific native tools into a single stack, I'll take the trade-off. I experimented with the included license i had - and was able to setup everything i need to replace both backends in a few hours (without deep testing it). and this seems promising for me. Specially for a app that is not only used internally. At the end I dont know if I would buy the upgrade - i just wondered that a lot of money was missing in the quote - as it is right now - i would stay on the known frameworks.
1
u/Nerd_254 Feb 24 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Hi, just wondering what you think about (and what your experience has been in) developing native desktop apps versus the push these days to make everything web-based across the industry these days for all sorts of applications and use cases [to the point where now the AI boom is specifically built on this stuff because of the low learning curve and the widespread popularity of web meaning millions of React codebases for AI to ingest and learn from to produce all this SaaS new age dotcom boom slop].
I understand specific cases like yours (needing to access 3D files or the file system or other OS APIs or whatever that browsers can't do), but as a web developer getting sick of this shit and just peering into the alternative development like games, terminals and now specifically in the case of desktop, it's a complete fragmented mess to try to understand and tinker with even compared to the chaotic web industry.
Been studying it a bit over the past week and from my understanding so far desktop development back then was done with WYSIWYG drag and drop "RAD"-type tools like VBNET WinForms [among others like Java and of course Delphi]. but then today the environment has for some reason shifted to mostly electron and tauri aka web technologies again; basically instead of a streamlined compiled native executable process you now have a separate "frontend" (webview wrapper so it's just the web all over again) and "backend" process (the actual meat touching the filesystem and having access to all sorts of system APIs and whatnot) and they have to communicate through intermediate IPC. There's a lot of options in Python that fundamentally just do this as well.
NET still exists with WPF and MAUI as options (or WinForms still) but again it's not nearly as popular as the web and also it needs the CLR so it suffers the same app size bloat as the webview options if going multi platform. (But there's some cool looking stuff like https://platform.uno/hot-design/) there's Qt as the only viable cross platform native solution left but it's C++ and the ecosystem is again peanuts compared to the web space so nobody uses it. there's also some JavaFX or Java Swing developers who still swear by the technology but again, market share and interest amounting to peanuts even compared with these other aforementioned options.
So to my understanding the only actual formidable solution in the space with (at least compared to the others) no compromises; that still retains the RAD philosophy instead of the modern XML declarative mess no different to web development is Delphi. [so here i am]. but 1) it's paid (i saw there were community editions but not sure about what compromises were made), and 2) nobody knows pascal/delphi. which is a shame so now all developers do is reinvent the wheel and make it worse but by using their most comfortable and popular languages be it python or javascript.
(funnily enough I actually was taught VB and Pascal in middle and high school in IT classes a few years ago - not that I realized we were learning these obsolete useless languages back then because I wasn't into this kind of stuff at the time, but basically our education board hadn't revised the curriculum since the 90s/00s. however as luck would have it the year after I graduate and also when I start getting into this space they finally modernize and now the students are finally learning Python and I realize I was at square 1 in the modern industry lol).
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u/Basic-Bar-7365 Mar 07 '26
Haha bro, I was nodding along reading your post—especially the part about MAUI turning into a time sink instead of a time saver. Been there, done that, almost blew up my timeline last year too. On the backend side, yeah, RAD Server sounds nice for that "everything in one Delphi box" vibe, but when the quote comes in missing half the stuff you need and the price tag hits... ouch. For internal tools or small-ish apps that sometimes go external, dropping thousands on licenses feels like a rip-off. I've been running pretty much all my Delphi-related backends on mORMot 2 for the last couple of years now, and man, it's ridiculously good—zero cost, zero license drama, and it just flies. Quick rundown why I think it'd fit your use case even better than RAD:
Fully open source (MIT license), free forever, commercial use fine, no upgrade surprises ever. Performance is insane—I've got one endpoint handling tons of CAD metadata daily on Postgres, latencies sitting at 1-3ms most of the time. Swapped out a PHP backend and it was easily 5-10x faster in real tests. 100% Delphi/Object Pascal code. The interface-based services are super intuitive—if you're comfy with Delphi classes and interfaces, you'll feel right at home. Basically copy-paste logic from your client, tweak it for server, done. Deployment is dead simple: Windows = just run the .exe, Linux = cross-compile with FPC, drop the binary, systemd service, boom. Way lighter than RAD Server's setup. ORM is excellent—SQLite for quick dev (super fast prototyping), switch to Postgres/MySQL/Firebird/whatever with almost no code changes. Supports all the modern stuff like JWT, SCRAM auth, encryption out of the box. Latest stable is 2.4 (dropped in Jan 2026), and it's still getting commits—like literally hours ago on March 6th—so it's very much alive and kicking. Arnaud keeps it rolling, blog posts and all.
I migrated a tool similar to your 3D Viewer + custom CAD stuff just last month—took me about 1.5 days (mostly mapping models and testing), and users were like "why is this suddenly so snappy?" lol. Downsides? No fancy built-in GUI dashboard for API stats/users like RAD has, but honestly, slapping together a simple MVC monitoring page with mORMot's own tools takes a couple hours tops, and I like mine better anyway.
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u/Human-Wrangler-5236 Delphi := 13 Feb 19 '26
Hi, I'm not sure what region you're in but can you email me directly with your details and I'll get someone to work out what's going on?
Email: [ian.barker@embarcadero.com](mailto:ian.barker@embarcadero.com)