Where do you see this? I'm actually thinking of buying the software right now and I explicitly asked what other charges are there besides the initial fee (~$100) and they said there wasn't any. Am I not asking the right question?
I seriously doubt that it's just $100 -- but, I guess if you are making an application that you are just going to run yourself on a single machine, it would not cost much. The costs tended to increase with the number of computers you were deploying to. Or perhaps we used something more capable (does that come with all languages -- including Chinese/Japanese/Korean and RTL languages).
Aye, I just had a back and forth with a tech rep there. They advised me at the end to contact sales to 100% understand, but the gist I got was that the FineReader Engine is $100 and it can do anything the SDK can do, but you have limited functionality in how it can operate with other programs (on Mac, all you get is Automator) and it can't be scaled to many cores. If you don't need that, then it seems to be a pretty damn good deal. Will talk to the sales rep first though.
What kind of problem were you dealing with? Were you bumping up against any constraints?
We were an image-processing SDK with OCR add-ons which were us reselling 3rd party SDKs with integration to our codecs and the processing code. It needed to be completely general purpose use in any .NET program (web, service, desktop, console, etc) since we didn't really want to get into usage with our customers (we had no royalties or usage restrictions on our part).
I think we opted for the customer actually obtaining their Abbyy license from Abbyy in the end because of the licensing mis-match. We sold just the wrapper.
Our parent company was a big user of Abbyy, and I think had a totally custom deal. They needed it for all of the language support and similarly wanted the full power to run it at high-speed and inside of .NET programs.
