What are "Concurrents" and how are they calculated?

Concurrents (or Concurrent User Sessions) are the user sessions that are accessing and using the applications to conduct their business at a specific point in time. The algorithm used by the Agile Platform to count concurrents has been the designed to only count sessions from the moment they start until their usage actually finishes. Additionally, short lived peaks of excess usage are ignored.

Here are a few examples of our benchmarks on existing applications:

• A Customer Relationship Management system for 25 Customer Representatives uses 10 Concurrents;
• A Public Web Site to handle 2,000 Daily Visitors uses 25 Concurrents;
• An Employee Intranet for 1,000 Employees uses 50 Concurrents;
• A Document Management & Workflow solution to handle 2,000 processes per month uses 100 Concurrents;

What are "Software Units" and how are they calculated?

Software Units (SUs) are a measure of business functionality, similar to Function Points (FPs) or Source Lines of Code (SLOC). SUs are computed on the number of web pages, forms, database tables, procedures, etc. For your reference, 100,000 Software Units is roughly equivalent to 80 database tables and 200 web pages.

Below are some examples of applications built using the Agile Platform and how many Software Units they consume:

• An Employee Directory to centrally manage all employee related information uses 5,000 SUs
• A Time Sheet Manager to manage the hourly allocation of the employees to the multiple projects in which they are involved uses 15,000 SUs
• A Public Web Site containing vast amounts of content and supporting some customer interaction processes uses 65,000 SUs
• An end-to-end Customer Relationship Management system to support customer information management, sales force automation and order management processes uses 90,000 SUs

Why is your pricing based on the number of "Concurrents"?

OutSystems offers an end-to-end enterprise application development, integration, deployment and management solution which includes all the capabilities listed above, from visual design and modeling, to change management, and enterprise-grade availability and performance management. Traditionally, in order to get access to such a broad set of functionality, you’d have to consider acquiring a broad set of products in multiple modules. Some of those products are licensed by developer seat, others by CPU and those often required you license all the modules separately. Instead of pricing each of our components similarly, we price the Agile Platform by “Concurrents”, a granular measure of concurrent user sessions that effectively conduct business using application built using the Agile Platform. This way we can offer you our fully integrated application suite in 4 different editions, starting for free (our Community Edition) and a very flexible "pay-as-you-grow" model.

I expect that many users will use my application. How can I predict the cost?

All editions are priced per Concurrents. Concurrents are based on the number of user sessions for your web application at any given moment in time. This means most websites, even with thousands of visitors, are under 100 Concurrents. Similarly, if you’re deploying an Intranet for your employees, you won’t need 1 concurrent per employee, since only a small portion of them will be using the software simultaneously. If you still believe you need many concurrents, we offer special volume discount schedules for very large installations. That will help you manage costs and scale your business accordingly. Please contact us for a detailed estimation and quote.