The ColdFusion license fee can be expensive for many. The Standard Edition right now costs $2,499 per license and the Enterprise Edition, $9,499.
When you install ColdFusion server hosting for the first time, you get a 60-day free trial. This means you can use all the standard and advanced features of ColdFusion without purchasing a license, during your trial period.
Does ColdFusion stop working after that? It doesn’t. Even when the trial period is over, if you don’t purchase a license, you can continue using ColdFusion beyond the first 60 days. Your ColdFusion installation starts working as an “Express” edition.
You can build full-fledged websites and mobile apps using the “Express” edition.
Can you separately install the Express edition? There is no separate installer for it. You can install the Standard Edition or the Enterprise edition and go on using it for 60 days with full access to all the features that the ColdFusion builder comes with. If you don’t add a license key after 60 days, it automatically switches to the Express edition.
Some important features are blocked. How do you know they are blocked? When you try to use them, a pop-up window comes up that tells you that these features are not available in the Express edition and for those features you may have to purchase a license.
The Express edition is good for learning ColdFusion. Although 60 days is a fair amount of time to have a comfort level and even build a couple of applications if you have already been programming in other languages, sometimes you cannot devote enough time to learning within those 60 days. This is when you can use the Express edition. Apart from the advanced features, you can use pretty much everything you need to build a functional website using the express edition of ColdFusion.