I want to personally thank all of the folks that signed up for and participated in the CF Fortuna pre-release programs over the last 6 months. We had nearly 500 people who joined the programs. This is a 3 -4x increase over the CF2021 beta program. I know we had issues with our engagement, and I personally learned a ton. This was my first time running any kind of beta program, and it showed, but I promise, on our side we did get a lot of value and your interactions with us, bug reports and feedback resulted in a better product that is going out here really, really soon. With yearly CF releases now becoming a thing, expect the beta program to get a big leaner, more efficient, and with folks getting in earlier so that we can make sure we surface issues sooner. Also expect tighter integration & communication with our partners. I'm excited for CF23 to land, but even more for what's ahead in '24.

Great, now which body part do I need to finance to buy my own copy of CF23 Standard so I can run a blog. I am totally asking for myself.

For now, hosting services allow you to use CF for $8.40/month. We're working on a step between hosts and AMIs (most likely a Fargate template or something along those lines). Is there something that you need that is not provided by a hosted solution?

Cfexecute for starters, python scripting. There are subtitle but substantial differences between lucee and afc and while I am an opensource posterchild, most of the Hosts either are not budget friendly (1 domain, 1 tb of data, 3- 100 mb databases, limited versions, and a number of database tables as well as databases and then there is the CONTENT. Hostek which is great for developing a bevy of standard MOM and pop, brick-and-mortar sites, is not so friendly for something say, like a strip club, weed shop, link referrals, or information on how to 3d print a SpaceMarine at 1/220 scale for Warhammer Epic.

Well you were asking about a blog for yourself. And you're now making crazy edge cases which 99.9% of users would not need. You need cfexecute for a blog? I don't know how much more "budget friendly" you can get than $9/month. If you want free hosting + CF just say that. Have you priced out AWS EC2? ($350/year for a T4.med btw). I can tell you this much, if you're hoping for a general license for ACF that is LESS than a hosting price, it just isn't going to happen. Hosts are the entry point. They're the most budget friendly way to get in on CF (if you're not a student that is). If you are wanting to host something that is... erm, disallowed, that's on you man lol. The issue at hand is that the NEXT jump is too big. Either AMI (about $3k/year for cloud CF Ent) or Standard (~ $3k license / 2 core). <cone-of-silence>(But if you're starting up a Weed/Strip Club/Warhammer business I want in though, let me just get that out there.)</cone-of-silence>

@Mark Takata (Adobe) Your Welcome. I am on the same boat as @Evil Ware. I am working on an open source web app and there isn't anything like the offering Jetbrains gives for open source projects. I am using Lucee at the moment but would like to test compatibility with CF 2023/2024 in the future.

Have you priced out the cost of ASP, or PHP, JAVA, Python, to name a few? All free, and maybe that is the line in the sand. I am not asking you to defend your company, I get it - What I am asking for is to do what Lightspeed or Nxing did, Ill pay 120 -400 for a standard core license, but the standard license for AFC is 2600, the release cycle is 24 months (Roughly) that places the cost at 108.33 per month, not to mention hosting fees. So for a blog, a small website, or a small business site, in which there aren't a lot of margins to begin with in developing, trying to convince anyone that they should invest 108.33 a month + hosting fees So they can safely host content without having some net nanny get their knickers in a wad as it offended "some child" is not cost-effective. I am not asking for Adobe to give away the farm, but I am asking for is something far more cost-effective than 108.33 per month in software fees. So your solution is to run AWS, which, just NO, absolutely NO, I won't go into the details, but NO. S0 350 + a year is a cost break? I'll stick with 200+ a year +open source software until Adobe adopts a more price-friendly model. Why? again, I want to control my content, not leave it pissing in the wind so some brain-dead help desk flunky can cross their ticket off as someone lodged a complaint that something offended some other half-wit online. & Yes, AWS has content hosting issues as well, Azure is great as long as you do not expect uptime or true privacy.

The solution will likely be "better". But I seriously doubt it will align with your, again, very specific needs. AWS is a partner. As is Azure. As is Google. We will likely work with them to create solutions that leverage their strengths.

@Evil Ware @Mark Takata (Adobe) The issue is the $2.5k licensing fee just for server software. Then since you can't run CF on shared hosting you still have to come up with $48/m mininum for a VPS with 8G RAM cause at $4 for 512m RAM on Digitalocean it just isn't enough RAM. Compare that to Python which is free. Add the hosting which can range from free to custom. Azure, Google & Amazon is going to be at least $100/m. Compare that to the custom quote I got from pythonanywhere I attached as a screenshot. For large enterprises $10k is nothing,but for open source projects and small companies that simply is too much.

@Ookma-Kyi I am with you on this. @Mark Takata (Adobe) I know adobe doesnt market to the SMB, which is a shame.