Adobe's Flex rich internet application development platform has been updated which has reduced the cost of the technology and has made it more competitive with open source AJAX. Flex 2 includes a number of free features such as Flex SDK. The real changes which have occurred are with regard to the pricing where Adobe is planning to reduce the cost of simple Flex deployment. It permits free single CPU deployments of Flex applications by making use of Flex Data Services 2 Express or XML and Web Services. Earlier Flex users had to pay $15,000 per CPU in order to get started with the Flex SDK which was a part of the Flex Presentation Server.

The company says that Flex provides capabilities which are not available in AJAX such as powerful management capabilities and rich media and graphics. Whalcott commented that AJAX did not support charting and graphing whereas it was possible for developers to deploy AJAX and Flex together.

The company is adopting the pricing strategy in order to achieve good growth and this would not have been possible with the earlier pricing model. If they have to remain competitive they have to adopt this strategy in order to give AJAX a tough competition.