Today, Rhomobile announced the simplification of the pricing scheme for its Rhodes open source application development framework for smartphones and RhoSync server product. Rhomobile is now offering what it calls predictable pricing.

Rhodes allows developers to use HTML rather than Objective-C or native device languages to create software that run on a number of different smartphone platforms—including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android—while RhoSync keeps application data current and available on a user's smartphone.

Here's is Rhomobile's new price structure:

Rhodes framework is still free for developers who open source their applications under GPLv3. That doesn't change. Rhomobile is now making commercial Rhodes licenses available at $500 per application, however; and it is offering commercial RhoSync server licenses based upon the planned number of users connected to the server.

PDAStreet asked Rhomobile CEO Adam Blum to explain how the simplified pricing model is beneficial to enterprise customers. "Previously Rhomobile charged developers on a percentage of sales or per seat basis," he said. "With our new simplified pricing model, customers can pay a known fee upfront for our technology making it easier for them to plan their overall cost of development and licensing."

In other words, pricing for Rhodes and Rhosync is fixed now. This should take the guess work out of the equation for enterprises when determining how much it would cost to use Rhomobile's products for creating mobile applications.

"Rhomobile was founded to allow enterprises to quickly and efficiently mobilize their workforce." Blum added. "We are excited to be rolling out the simplified pricing for enterprises and independent software vendors to make it even easier for them to deploy new mobile apps."

Furthermore, Blum asserted to PDAStreet that "by leveraging programmers existing web development skills, Rhodes breaks down the barrier between an inspired idea and a full blown mobile application. The Rhodes framework provides unparalleled ease-of-use and efficiency, allowing developers to build powerful mobile applications with about 20 percent of the code used to build smartphone apps today."

The latest version of Rhodes, 1.2, adds support for the push sync of data on the iPhone and BlackBerry. It uses the iPhone 3.0 SDK push APIs and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Push APIs to allow immediate updates of application date to users' smartphones.

The RhoSync server handles keeping information current and available locally on users' smartphones. It does this, according to Rhomobile, by retrieving data via web services (REST or SOAP) from backend enterprise applications for distribution to mobile devices downstream. The server also keeps a master store of all enterprise application data and tracks the information users have received.