If you are writing audio software you will meet this decision early, and the pricing pages are vaguer than they need to be. Here are the numbers.
What JUCE costs
As of October 2026, from juce.com:
- Starter — free, perpetual, for revenue up to $20,000.
- Indie — $40/month, or $800 once, for revenue up to $300,000.
- Pro — $175/month with a twelve-month minimum, or $3,500 once, no revenue cap.
- Educational — free, if you qualify.
There is also an AGPLv3 option. That is a real option, and for open-source work it is the right one. It is not an option if you ship closed-source binaries, which is what most people selling a plugin are doing.
The shape of it
Read those tiers as a staircase rather than a price. At $19,000 of revenue you pay nothing. Cross $20,000 and you are on Indie. Do well enough to cross $300,000 and you are on Pro, which is $2,100 a year on the subscription, or $3,500 to stop paying it.
That is not outrageous for what JUCE does. But notice what it means: the better your product does, the more the framework costs you, and the decision gets harder to reverse the longer you build on it. Rewriting your audio layer at $300,000 of revenue is not a thing anyone does happily.
There is a second cost that is not on the pricing page. Every unusual thing you want from your UI becomes a negotiation with someone else's toolkit. That is not a licence fee, but it is a cost, and it is the one we felt most.
What we did
We wrote SND, our own audio and UI foundation, and built everything on it. It is cross-platform audio I/O, a GUI shell, plugin hosting and a write-once plugin SDK — VST3, AU and standalone from one source.
Having done that, we had to price it.
£399. Paid once. Unlimited use across every product you ship, for one company, with all future updates included. No revenue thresholds, no tier to graduate onto, nothing that gets more expensive because you did well.
We picked a single payment deliberately. A framework you are still paying for in five years shapes what you are willing to build on it. One payment, and then the decision is behind you.
Free for noncommercial use, as it happens, so you can find out whether you like it before any of this matters.