> Visual Studio Community 2013 (and 2015) are completely free and nearly fully featured.

But have licensing terms which limit the contexts in which they can (legally) be used.

> Gone are the days of Express being a super lightweight VS IDE.

Express is still a super lightweight VS IDE. Community may eliminate most of the use cases for Express, since most of the cases where it makes sense to use Express may be places where Community is an available, per the licensing restrictions, and better choice.

the Windows Server Licenses are the expensive part

But god help you if you need SQL server beyond what express provides. (Web is OK but expensive, "standard" or enterprise? Now that hurts)

> god help you if you need SQL server beyond what express provides

Too much drama. Here's pricing for m3.large:

  Red Hat:      $0.193
  Windows:      $0.259
  Win + SqlWeb: $0.367

Besides, you get several(?) free SQL licenses with BizSpark, if you're so inclined.

SQL Server Web Edition is not the same as Standard or Enterprise. The reason you use SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL is for Database Encryption, Analysis Services, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, etc. Web Edition won't even do mirroring.

The cost is worth it if it saves you multiple employees worth of development work or administration overhead, and in my experience it does. The pricing is also (surprise!) negotiable. At Loopt, our annual software licensing cost was well under the cost of one developer, and this was before BizSpark.

Basically, yep.

But you can see why people get some sticker shock: $14,256 on their website for SQL Server 2014 enterprise (per core!) http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/sql-ser...

However as you say, you could easily get a 50% discount on that without having a big SQL Server farm.

No bizspark required.