I haven't had a Rant in a long time, but I have to be real with you all. I've been a Telerik customer since 2008. That's a long time, at least to me, and for most of that time, they had the best .NET components available. It wasn't even a competition.
As the industry shifted toward client-side development in the early 2010s, Telerik was right there, launching KendoUI around 2011. It was a comprehensive, platform-agnostic suite built on jQuery, and for the most part, it just worked. The only real catch was the styling; it was always very opinionated. No matter how much you tweaked it, it never quite looked right next to everything else on the page due to its font and padding choices. This was a massive pain to get right, a problem that persisted through various theme builder updates. Even if you did manage, the next update would change enough where that theme didn't work anymore and the builder wouldn't load in what you DID have.. start from scratch.
A few years later, in 2014, Progress acquired Telerik. As frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue gained dominance, the strategy shifted to creating wrappers for them. These were still KendoUI's jQuery widgets under the hood, bundled into comprehensive packages like DevCraft Ultimate, which was fine—a logical next step.
Fast forward to today. The development world runs on modern frameworks. Using jQuery with "wrappers" is a non-starter; no one would take that approach seriously anymore. So, Telerik did the next logical thing: they decommissioned the wrappers and moved to pure, native components for frameworks like Vue, React, and Angular.
This is where my journey hits a wall. I have an entire site built on Vue 2 with the old KendoUI jQuery wrappers. I want to modernize it and move to Vue 3—it's 2025, after all. But after asking in the forums, I learned my Sitefinity KendoUI license only covers the old jQuery bits. If I want to upgrade my components to the new, native Vue versions, I have to buy a license, sure why not, I will absolutely do that.
A quick look at their site shows a price tag of around $899 USD for a one-year license. That's a lot of money, and it's because they don't sell you what you need; they sell you a bundle. You're forced to buy components for Vue, React, Angular, and jQuery. They also throw in "Building Blocks" and a "Theme Builder," but from experience, I can tell you those are essentially useless if you're trying to integrate with a modern design system like Bootstrap or Tailwind. They just don't look right, so you can forget about them as a selling point.
And this gets to the heart of it: the pricing is just bonkers and completely out of touch with what you get. As a solo developer, I'm focused on a specific framework for my projects. I'm not bouncing between Angular, React, and Vue all day. I use Vue. I want to give them my money for their excellent, complex components like the grid and the spreadsheet—the ones with features like built-in Excel and PDF export that save me a ton of work. But I can't.
There's such a disconnect from what development used to be versus what it is now. Back in the day, the landscape was evolving so fast that having a massive "Ultimate" toolbox with WPF, Silverlight, and testing tools was genuinely exciting. But today, I can't justify spending nearly $1,200 USD for an ultimate license when I won't use 90% of what's in it. What developers like me need is bespoke licensing for specific products and specific projects.
If they came to me and said, "The Vue component suite is $150, maybe $200," I could sell that to my clients or my boss in a heartbeat. Customer acquired. But I can't go to the people holding the purse strings and say, "We need to spend $799, and by the way, we'll never touch 80% of what we're paying for." It's just not going to happen.
And I get the idea behind the bundle, I really do. It's a great deal for a development shop with multiple clients using different frameworks; your bases are covered in every scenario. Cool. But that's a development shop, not a solo developer. I'm not going to take on jQuery or Angular projects in 2025. I specialize in Vue, and I want to stick to my craft.
So now I'm left looking at open-source options or other, less expensive vendors, and honestly, I'm just sad about it. I wish they would see this, but it feels like Progress and Telerik are pricing themselves into outer space for anyone but the largest enterprises. I remember being asked as an MVP to do a Kendo conference in Toronto years ago and on the floor some smarmy dev really just came out and said "Why should I pay for this when I can get an open source one free"... look man it's ALL ABOUT SUPPORT. There's NO SUPPORT better than Telerik... well there wasn't. Then they kinda went into this feature request portal system where it felt like sure you can vote on things, but they're gonna just do what they're gonna do regardless of what's there or what developers want. I shouldn't have to maintain a repo of Sitefinity extensions just because Sitefinity hasn't updated their developer API with helpers to make things easier to work with... but I did. Everyone was clammoring for the backend to be done in .net core to fix the speed issues, but instead they rebuilt the frontend into a second React project framework that called back to the old 4.8 system to build itself with JSON... cool I guess, but... backend maybe? I just finished moving you from WebForms to MVC... MVC is legit a good dev experience. I use it daily, I still love using it, but it hasn't improved for me Mr. Developer like it has for Mr. Content Editor.
This isn't an isolated issue, either. Look at Sitefinity. They now want $10,000 USD for a support package. Support used to be not only free but, frankly, some of the best you could get. Their agents were amazing. Now, you pay thousands a year for the license, and if you hit a snag, you're expected to pay another $10,000 for what has become, in my current experience, weak support if any at all. I ran into an issue where their official advice—use the CLI for an upgrade—completely failed. I opened a ticket, and after being ghosted on the related GitHub issue, support finally responded. That was three months ago, and they're still waffling. I had to figure it all out myself, and there are still lingering problems. I can't imagine how furious I'd be if I had actually paid $10,000 for that experience. (I want to specifically exclude Junior from this, dude is an allstar, also other agents from the last few years, all great). To pay a LOT to license a product, have the official update method not work, and be slow doing it, then tell people to pay 10k or use "professional services" (which would be going to a 3rd party... basically us, so a junior who knows less than I do) seems like a shake down.
It seems clear that Progress is for enterprises now, not for developers. That era feels long gone. I understand they need to make money, of course they do. But if you want a community of developers to love, use, and recommend your products, you can't keep relentlessly cutting us off at the knees. Even things like blocking AI indexing (Cursor) of documentation so it understands their tooling better and the developer has an easier time... blocked.
I was the biggest Telerik and Sitefinity supporter out there. I've been a multi-year MVP for both. This entire site exists because I needed a place to blog about all the great things I was doing with their products. And now, I'm at the end of my rope. I can no longer, in good conscience, tell someone to use Sitefinity because 'the support will always be there,' and I certainly can't tell them to contact sales with the confidence that they'll be helped. It's a disheartening, there's LOTS of great people there, especially on the Sitefinity side, but unless you have endless pockets you should probably move elsewhere.
Like team $200 USD doesn't move a needle, but it's recurring, and it can multiply.
Man... all I wanted to do was use native vue3 components, that's it. I guess it's the "tough sh*t deal with it" from all the sales and account managers up the pipe... I'm just exhausted with it.