WinDev's new licensing model: what it changes for your business application

Since PC SOFT was acquired by the Volaris group (Constellation Software), announced at the end of 2024, WinDev's commercial model has changed. The vendor no longer sells perpetual licenses tied to a physical key: access to WinDev, WebDev and WinDev Mobile now goes through a subscription, with initial subscription fees followed by annual or three-year payments.

This is not only a question of price. A tool bought once and usable indefinitely becomes a right of use to renew: while the subscription runs you can open, modify and recompile your projects; if it stops, your source code is still yours, but the tool that makes it useful is not.

Pricing tied to application deployment has also been mentioned for the 2026 versions, and terms vary from one contract to the next. Before deciding anything, have the vendor quote your actual case — number of developers, number of deployed workstations, commitment period — rather than relying on the figures going around.

For many companies this is no detail: the WinDev application is their order management, production or after-sales system, written ten or fifteen years ago and used every single day. It depends on a single vendor for the language (WLanguage), the IDE, the database engine (HFSQL) and deployment. A change in pricing policy, in that position, is something you absorb.

Staying is not necessarily a bad decision. If the application is stable, rarely modified, and the subscription remains affordable, paying is often cheaper than a rewrite. The right way to decide is to put both costs side by side over three to five years, not to react in the heat of the moment.

There is also a middle road: freeze the existing scope and build new requirements alongside it, on a standard stack, interfaced with the current database. You stop investing in the dependency without starting from scratch, and a full rewrite becomes an option rather than an emergency.

When a rewrite is the right call, we start with an audit: an inventory of windows and reports, a read of the WLanguage code, the HFSQL analysis, and a survey of existing integrations. The point is to separate what is actually used from what piled up over the years and nobody opens any more.

The rewrite is then progressive, module by module, with the old and the new application running side by side during the transition. HFSQL data is moved into a new database engine with its history, and integrations with your ERP — Sage 100, Sage X3, Batigest — are preserved so nothing stops on the management side.

You end up with a web or mobile application built on standard technologies (TypeScript, Angular or Next.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL), hostable wherever you want, including on your own servers. The code is yours, documented and tested, and no license fee decides whether you are allowed to keep improving it.

Using WinDev and wondering what to do? We offer a free thirty-minute audit to put the numbers down: subscription cost over five years, the scope that genuinely needs taking over, and a rewrite estimate. If staying with PC SOFT is the most sensible decision, we will tell you so.