Visual Assist Indie sponsors the full product for solo developers and pre-revenue studios up to five. The same build that ships to paying teams at Epic, Meta, and Alibaba, free for a year.
Reviewed by a person on our team. Most applicants hear back in 1–2 business days.
Same flow, same free product. One license per person — issued to your email, never tied to a machine.
Personal, non-commercial game projects. That includes:
Small studio, pre-revenue? Apply for a batch. How it works:
Max 5 named members. Bigger team? Talk to us.
Verified students or instructors: the academic license is faster — instant access for .edu holders.
.edu
We draw one line: are you earning on this work yet? Answer honestly — the verdict updates as you go. Nothing is submitted here.
Name, email, country, and an inquiry box. No uploads.
Open the form
A few lines in the inquiry field. Include:
1–2 business days, usually faster. One of three answers: approved, need more proof, or not a fit.
Approved? Your license arrives at the email you applied with. Download Visual Assist from the same page paying customers use and activate.
Navigate, refactor, and read code that breaks stock IntelliSense. Engine source, deep macros, legacy C++, mid-edit files — the parser stays fast and accurate at scale.
Jump Blueprints ↔ C++, search project-wide, and refactor without losing UE's macros. The features hobby UE devs ask about most are already in the box.
VA Intelligence runs on your hardware, only when you trigger it. No ambient context-grabbing, and no code leaves your machine without you asking.
"There's just no reason for anyone to ever use Visual Studio without Visual Assist." — Ryan V., Game Director
Our Indie program runs for one year. There's no auto-renew, so you refresh by reapplying through the same form. A year is enough for a project to ship, a job to start, or a team to grow. When that happens, you can move to a Standard license.
$129 / year
Individual, commercial work, personal funds only.
$279 + $119/yr
Per-named-user maintenance. Can be purchased by a company.
Quote
Self-hosted license server for teams. Contact sales.
See full pricing No reinstall — a rep handles the upgrade against the same email.
Yes. The Indie build is the same Visual Assist as paid Personal. No feature gating, no watermark.
No. Each approved Indie license is keyed to one named applicant. If you have a small team, apply for the team track — each approved member gets their own license. (Multi-user setups on the paid side run through the Network or Concurrent license server, not the Indie program.)
The team track caps at 5. You can still submit a quote and we'll consider it, though approval isn't the default once you're past 5. A working studio of 6+ usually fits the paid tiers, and we can quote those too.
The threshold is roughly $1,000 lifetime from the project. Jam prizes, a few ko-fi supporters, or a small itch launch don't kick you out. Past that, or once your game has an active commercial storefront listing, move to a paid tier.
Game-adjacent OSS (engines, plugins, tools, libraries used in game dev) fits naturally. For OSS with no real game connection, the program is the wrong frame. The free trial plus a Personal license is a cleaner path.
No. The trial is the fastest way to evaluate Visual Assist with no application or wait. Apply for an Indie license once you've decided VA is part of your setup and you qualify.
No. The academic license is the better fit if you have a verified educational email. Instant access, no queue. Indie is for everyone else who qualifies.
Community forums and the public knowledge base. Priority support is a paid-tier feature. Long-time customers reach our named team on the forum for diagnostic help.
Two reasons. A yearly re-check keeps the program honest; your situation can change a lot in a year. The alternative was building a usage-tracking system we don't have and don't want to build, so a clean yearly quote works for everyone.
Free · fully sponsored · reviewed by a person · no credit card
Not sure yet? Start the 30-day free trial — no application, no credit card. Apply for Indie any time after.