Surely it is all relative?
DT Pro is invaluable to me, I can’t speak for Devon Agent as I don’t have a use for it, but I’ve found Pro to be one of the most useful pieces of software I own. Paying £8.00 ($15) for a companion app that will be almost as useful, when a few wrinkles are ironed out, is a bargain. This kind of money is equivalent to three coffees (though I prefer to calculate it as three pints of Guiness), or a coffee and a magazine.
I have spent over £50 trying to find a notetaking app for the iPhone that works as advertised, or matches the functions I require. They all sit there unused, and that includes a Premium subscription to Evernote at way more than £8 per year. It is also not so long ago I was playing around with similar problems on Symbian and Windows Mobile spending far more than DTTG to solve the problem.
I now have three invaluable applications on my iPhone, all of them ‘premium’ pricing on the app store, DTTG, Pocket Informant and Omnifocus. All of them are quality applications, are updated on a regular basis, have good support and a decent user community. Two of them also have top quality desktop companions, with a premium pricing for there kind, but are again worth the extra £ for the same reasons as their mobile equivalent.
I will point out that every Premium DTTG equivalent application I have tried has suffered a similar set of problems with syncing as DTTG, I suspect it is something to do with the iOS shackles, but try support for SOHO Notelife, hint there is no user forum, that is if you can get the application to function smoothly on the desktop. That particular suite offers a lot, and if it worked as advertised, got the updates quickly, had a user forum, and was produced by a company that didn’t commit you to regular paid upgrades on the desktop would be a good alternative. Sadly it doesent offer half as much as Devon do, and that is why they have my money, support and commitment.
If you don’t want to go for a premium product, look at something like Notebooks, it doesent require too much ‘cloud’ to sync, an important plus for me, but it does require more steps to push the data around where you want it, and the same in reverse getting the data to the iDevice. There are lots of similar apps on the store, but good luck to you, my experiance is that there will be a lot of disappointment before you find what you are looking for, costing more than £8 on the way.
As for DTPro and it’s extended beta, I can’t say that I ever came across any licensing difficulties, it upgraded fine everytime, but the important point to me was that while ‘in’ beta it never felt like a beta. I had neither problems with the application, and no data loss using it, very important points to consider. If I was mission critical there was always the v1 option.
For the record I’m just a very satisfied user of DT, and now DTTG.