License and pricing

I agree, the difference between community and enterprise is to steep.
With the community you can barely create a normal web-application (it's seems much, you hit the boundary pretty fast)
and then you have to cough up 15K.

This is my personal opinion btw ;)

Probably the support demanded by the little customers was taking to much time to compensate and they decided to block the entrance of more small companies so they could focus on the bigger ones.

I understand their goal. The question is if the Community Edition is enough to sell a 10k€ product at your company. For a start-up it seems impossible.

Hello Antonio,

My personal opion about this is that I think that OS is not doing the right thing with the start-up price if € 15.000 a year. This step is too large for small companies (or even mid-sized or big companies who want to take a 'look' or OS is a good tooling). But then again, I can't take a look in the OS kitchen so don't know if they are doing the right thing with this.

As far I have ever understood, OS is mostly comming in a company by a side step. After a succes this will expanded trough other departments of the company and so on. This was even explaind in the training video's when I watched them (almost 3 years ago). But starting with licence price of € 15.000 a year this becomes a bigger step to take. In mine opion OS has always concentreted on the bigger customers (for bigger companies a licence on yearly based is more 'common') but never really got into that market. From my own position I also must say OS is still a very 'unkown' company in the Netherlands (when speaking to with old classmates of my education, nobody seems to know OS) so thats also a step to take.

As I've said before, this is from mine own position, maybe business is going right in other places/countries?

Kind regards,
Evert

Hello Antonio,

My personal opion about this is that I think that OS is not doing the right thing with the start-up price if € 15.000 a year. This step is too large for small companies (or even mid-sized or big companies who want to take a 'look' or OS is a good tooling). But then again, I can't take a look in the OS kitchen so don't know if they are doing the right thing with this.

As far I have ever understood, OS is mostly comming in a company by a side step. After a succes this will expanded trough other departments of the company and so on. This was even explaind in the training video's when I watched them (almost 3 years ago). But starting with licence price of € 15.000 a year this becomes a bigger step to take. In mine opion OS has always concentreted on the bigger customers (for bigger companies a licence on yearly based is more 'common') but never really got into that market. From my own position I also must say OS is still a very 'unkown' company in the Netherlands (when speaking to with old classmates of my education, nobody seems to know OS) so thats also a step to take.

As I've said before, this is from mine own position, maybe business is going right in other places/countries?

Kind regards,
Evert

i totally agree. for a startup where community isnt enough, having to invest 15k/year is a huge risk.

if it doesnt work out the 1st year, having to invest further 15k might be impossible. even if it might be a great idea.
in my oppinion, OS risks loosing great customers with huge potential that way.
after all a startup already requires huge investments in advertising. since a product isnt sold untill its known.

and regarding OS guidelines, it would also be better creating a web-app in agile platform directly.
rather than creating it with a different technology, start earning money and then migrate to agile platform.
in such a case, also - why migrate if its already running and generating income

I've found that you can squeeze a surprising amount of functionality into the Community Edition, but you need to really be dilligent about it. For example, IntelliWarp creates exception handling by default in every Action, even though the Theme has an Exception handling flow. By deleting the per-action Exception handling, you get a LOT of SU's back!

Now, does that mean that a giant commercial app can be put into Community Edition? No. But I *do* feel that the CE license is more than ample for a startup... especially one that is very selective about the initial features while they ramp up business and prove their revenue... to get off the ground.

J.Ja

I fully agree with you, a startup can try (and most probably can) start with a community license.
But lets talk clearly. 
Is there any document where we can read about using the Community license for commercial app?
The OS site talks about "1 Desktop Server" and "Free for evaluation and personal use".

If yes, will it come the day that we are not allowed to use it anymore?

Os will loose a lot of new potential clients when it will shut down to small ones.
OS is going against the tide of other software developers. Lower prices and more clients.

With the first price table I was ready to go with OS, now am afraid of loosing my invested time.

Antonio

Antonio - I can tell you that from my experience, if you have a few well-paid developers on a team, the time savings from using Agile Platform more than makes up for the license cost. Furthermore, if you consider the better time to market, that pays for it too. Look at it like this... if you would take 6 months with PHP, or 3 months with Agile Platform, and your developer costs $5,000/month and your revenue stream is $10,000/month, Agile Platform saves you $15,000 in developer costs, and increases your revenue by $30,000. I would say that making an extra $45,000 is worth the $20,000 license, wouldn't you? And add on top of that the reduced headaches around deployment & maintenance, and the ability to easily iterate the application... and yes, you can easily justify the purchase of a license, even with the new price structure!

As a third-party consultant, I *have* seen a shift in the customers since the new pricing was announced, but it is actually benfitting me greatly. I am spending a lot less time with smaller, self-funded companies, and a lot more time with larger companies with bigger budgets, bigger projects, and longer timelines. As a result of the increased stability of the revenue, I am in the process (and will be done in a few weeks) of shifting my time 100% to consulting work with Agile Platform.

J.Ja

I agree with the original post. I remember the old pricing had a $200/mo tier. I thought that was too much because I had wanted to make an application that was just too big for the community edition and I was doing a one-off project at no charge for a non-profit. My client had to think long and hard to spend $30/month for a virtual server to host OutSystems. There is no way they could rationize $200/mo perpetually. Now it is $20,000/year.

Clearly OS is not aiming for that kind of business (why would they?) and are actually moving in the opposite direction. No doubt this business model is profitable.

OutSystems might consider this however. A large door into any company large or small is to become the Microsoft Access of Web Application Development. This is a tried and true business model. The main requirements are extremely low barrier to entry and can't be beat for efficiency and ease of use. The hook is that applications, once built, become indispensible and then it is time to pay up.

OutSystems meets those requirements, probably better than anything I've seen ... except for low barrier to entry. I think this also explains why OS remains a relative unknown up until now. Among my network of developers, none know of OutSystems.

One pricing model that would achieve low barrier to entry in my opinion would be: no charge until application in-production, reduce the software unit factor of multiplication by an order of magnitude (software complexity is only loosely related to value, and even if it is, I added the value), OR charge for the toolset, but only once. Charge for a specific run-time configuration by application, charge more for enterprise features and high availability. Trust yourselves and your product. You will be repaid in volume and increased brand awareness.

Steve

Problem is, and I see nobody talking about this aspect much, is Agile Platform ready to be used as an Enterprise application at present? Despite how much I like it I have to be honest and say no. In an Enterpise setting Agile Platform would have play nice with other established systems you would find there. And in my opinion it is far from that at present. The biggest reason is that it is almost completely self reliant. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Most bigger companies have set down guidelines and standards for various aspects of in house software development. They have as such often designated things like a revision control system, CI build servers, Application Lifecycle Management tools and so forth and so forth. Agile Platform has no options at all for conforming to any of these systems at present. It does all of this on its own. Which is a great feature for smaller and middle sized companies that are less strict about such things but for an Enterprise sized company are mandatory (for obtaining certifications and whatnot). It seems odd to me then this recent move in licensing which would make the product targetted almost exclusively for an Enterprise setting. Now I know how many of you are going to argue that this 'do-it-all-yourself' approach in AP works great and that is certainly true. It just doesn't fit with the standards and guidelines it will encounter in an Enterprise. Especially if it ends up in teams that previously did C# or Java work which is very likely if you consider that extensions might have to be designed. Such teams especially will have standardized tools like Team Foundation build servers and revision control systems, linked to maybe Jira and (Microsoft/HP) Test Director. The list often goes on and on. There are good reasons for all of this too, auditing and efficiency in planning multiple teams of developers working on different (yet often intermingled) software products side by side , are only a few reasons why this must exist.

Hello Justin 

Again, I fully agree with you. I'm happy that you have such clients and I believe that OS will be a good investement for you.
But you are in the business already.
Im talking about who is starting, as I am.
Im developing an application for the web that targets to general public.
Can be a great sucess and then I will need a big license without any problem. Good for me and to OS.
But can also be a failure or just a small sucess. Than it will be good for OS (in the first year) and very bad for me!
Will I risk such an investement? Believe not.
Its better to start with a tool that will be affordable and help me to grow with it.
I thought that OS was exactely that. with the community edition and all...

Antonio

Hi guys from Outsystems
Dont be shy and please can you participate in the discussion ;-)

I would appreciate an answer about my question above:
"Is there any document where we can read about using the Community license for commercial app?"

Thanks in advance

Antonio

As Hans is saying, it seems that OS is positioning itself on a situation where they will be neither.
They will have to struggle hard to be Enterprise.
They are dumping the possibility of open new markets and clients.
Trend today is to give affordable entry level to any application.
Again, OS will lose a lot of new potential clients when it will shut down to small ones.
I've seen already what is to rely on a small group of big companies and what happens when they decide to move in another direction. Been there! Twice!
What called my attention for OS in the first place, was exactly the possibility to have a free community license and standard scheme of licensing that would allow me to grow with them. Without that, I wouldn’t even had tried OS.

Amazon AWS is a great example:
-Start free for one year with a micro instance
-then pay as you grow and your usage increase
Music to my ears. They will be my partners

Antonio

Justin,

It's nice you want to compare PHP with Outsystems, but compare it with .NET.
I am pretty sure I can built as fast with a  NHibernate, .Net and sass/less en some opensource frameworks as with OutSystems.

It's so hard to convince people (at least in holland) they have to pay a licence for a .net application.
And no, it does not matter if OutSystems got lifetime, truechange, multi-tenancy and more.
In the customers' eye they see .NET and 15K and they simply cannot get over that!

It's like a red flag for a bull (or whatever the saying is) :)

 
Hi António,
On the Editions page you can check the limitations of the Community Edition. There are no restrictions for commercial use other than the limitations of the Community edition itself (application size limited to 30k SUs, unlimited number of users). Bear in mind that there is no technical support for the community edition other than the forums. We try to answer all questions in the forums and the community does a good job on themselves as well. The no-lock in option is also not available on the Community edition, which means you cannot extract the code from your apps even if you no longer want to use the agile platform.
hope this helps
cheers 

Joost -

As someone who is coming from the .NET world, I think that Agile Platform is still much better than what .NET has to offer. All that NHibernate and a framework address are things to kind of get you from "point A" to "point B", but the lifecycle and daily "I have to live with this" still is poor in comparison to Agile Platform. As someone who used to have to push applications from dev to staging to production on a regular basis, I can tell you that your choices with .NET are to either invest a lot of time into building a build/deployment method, scripts, etc., or to do a lot of manual work.

But... most importantly... how long does it take to take "someone with a basic knowledge of data" and turn them into a "programmer who knows what they are doing" with Agile Platform vs. .NET, and how much time investment does it involve to keep current in the two platforms?

J.Ja

Many thanks for this discussion everyone
I found OS price a little confusing but take away the following excellent points.
price is relevent to:
* Time savings from using Agile Platform v's well-paid developers on a team
* Shift in the customers less smaller, self-funded companies more larger companies (bigger budgets, bigger projects, and longer timelines)

Community edition,
* Means you cannot extract the code from your apps
* Application size limited to 30k SUs, unlimited number of users

Is it possible for the Community edition guys (ComEds) to buy extra SU's?

Love the work OS, great job

I think all the points made so far are excellent.  In trying to sell a custom appliciation to a prospective customer, there are 2 pricing aspects to consider: the upfront cost  and the ongoing cost.  I think Justin's points are spot on regarding the upfront cost savings in building an application using the Outsystems Agile Platform. 

Where I run into trouble is in trying to justify the ongoing annual costs to potential customers.

For a fairly small application that will remain relatively stable over time, it is hard to justify 20K + per year with little clear benefit.  If the application is going to change quite a bit, the savings in modification time may justify the cost.

Another point for Outsystems to consider is cultivating a development community. The Community Edition is not adequate for that purpose IMO due to the low SU count.  I believe that Outsystems would benefit greatly by drawing developers in and allowing them to spread the word in the companies they work with.  Therefore I suggest a developer edition with a high SU count, that cannot be used in production.

Just my 2 cents,
Adam

Hello

Based on Adam post, I want to make a couple of questions:

What does it mean "unlimited servers" and "unlimited" development environment?
Does it mean that with a license we can install as many production servers as we want?
If I buy me one license, can I install it at as many clients as I want?
I don’t see any limitation on the Editions page.
Therefore, can I split the yearly costs of one license I’ll own, between all my small clients?

If I own a license and a project is relatively stable over time, maybe I can just use the no-lock in option, get the source code, and make the small corrections directly on the code in the future? I have to pay only the first year.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but 15.000€/year is a lot of money!

Before, you could pay as you grow!

Now,

If you want to develop something, to someone that can not pay more than 200€/month, OS is not an option! :(

OS Developers can only work in big companies?

Antonio, 
each Agile Platform license is bound to a single infrastructure. Each infrastructure has several Environments (DEV -> QA -> TST -> ... -> PROD). Each environment may have several servers/frontends, in order to horizontally scale your applications, or define a set of applications that go to a DMZ vs an internal network for example.
The Enterprise edition allows you to have as many Non-production environments as you want (DEV, QA, TST, Regression, etc) but a single Production environment (for a single customer/site/software factory). It is not limited on the number of frontends you can have (nor number of CPUs, CPU Cores, etc) as it is common on server software. It also allows you to have a second Production environment, only for Disaster recovery scenarios (where it stays 'offline' most of the time until your Production infrastructure runs into some critical problem and you need to activate the second one).

 
The no-lock in option only allows you to detach the entire set of applications. It is available if you decide to stop using the Agile Platform. Remember that the Agile Platform is not a code generator. It allows you to monitor and change your application accross time. Even when the changes are relatively small, the amount of data, running business processes or even the set of integrations that your application has needs to be monitored and healthy accross time... That the only way to keep applications fresh for years. Maintenance costs of an application (not only related to new requirements) traditionally overrun the initial implementation costs. So, unless the application is not being used by your users, you get real value from keeping the applications stable and healthy before you run into a "fire" and need to stress over putting it off (usually kicking the overall quality down). 

 

Cristal clear. I think I have a clearer view of OS licensing.

I cannot help but agree with all the recent posts regarding 'Licencing'. I am new to AgilePlatform as only stumbled upon it just a few days. The product appears great but it appears to me it is only for the big boys; hence, small companies should look elsewhere.

Pricing structures of this nature have killed great products because the small were priced out of using them. I hope Outsystems do think hard about this before they kill their great product. It is possible that pricing has scared off a lot of potential customers as the published installed systems demonstrate. The installed systems should be higher than this because this is really a great IDE.

The competitors need not fear because Outsystems have shot themselves in the foot with this one. It is surprising to see that Outsystems developed this product to save companies loads of money but this product is not cheap at all. Subscription at nearly £12,000 per year is steep. This a proper cash cow.

I happened on this site only a few hours ago. So I am really new to this product.

But I spent many years developing applications based on FileMaker Pro. The company kept changing the licensing arrangements. It really upset our clients.

Eventually I led development of once:radix (can be found on SourceForge) and we built some pretty impressive apps using it. But we never achieved the momentum we hoped for more reasons than I can explain here.

The bottom line for OS is that they DO have a business model as is their right. They can and WILL change it to suit their own interests. So NEVER imagine they will put your interests ahead of theirs.

As for the price. Apple WebObjects was similarly priced to the OS product - $50,000 in the beginning. apple.com was built using it. After a while, they realised that no one would pay the price. Eventually, the price dropped to $699 and is now free. But Agile is selling and as long as that's the case, you have a couple of choices: Use the community licence but accept that it is limited or switch to another toolset.

Complaining about their pricing policy will get you nowhere. And even if they were to offer an entry-level licence, my experience in the long run is that pricing policy will change and usually to the detriment of your business.

That said, writing as someone who really understands the complexities of this technology, AgilePlatform is an extraordinary product. They have done a great job and no doubt it will continue to improve.

Rob - Welcome to the OutSystems community!

J.Ja

Hi All,

I'm surveying this RAD tool and just received reply from OutSystems about license charge as followings.
If you are a small team and try to use commuity edition, even they claim no vendor lock-in, actually you are trapped. So count your affordable $ before going forward on more step.

Victor
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Edited @ 2013-03-18 11h00: email content removed by community manager. Rationale on the next post.
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Hi Victor,

I have redacted your post to remove the pricing information you have received from our Sales Development Representative.
Interested parties in getting the Enterprise Edition can use the Contact Us form to get in touch with our Sales staff and that way they will have the assistance they need in evaluating the Agile Platform licensing. Sharing the information is the forums does not provide the same human support... and that's why we don't do it. :)

Code extraction is an Enterprise Edition feature (nothing new there) which does provide an exit option (thus the "no lock-in"). That said, when you start working with the visual language and realize that you don't have to write/debug C#/Java code to get stuff done... "code extraction" becomes less and less relevant. :)

Have you tried out the (FREE) Community Edition yet? I'd love to hear about your experience with it.
Are you hitting any limitations? If so, what's your specific use case? 

Cheers,
Davide

At the risk of making the discussion even more fierce. The fact that you (read Outsystems in general) feel the need to remove pricing information that is 'leaked' to the public is part of the problem.

To me any company that feels the need to obscure such information knows that there is a problem with the price. What you call 'human support' is really opening the door for a 'sales pitch'. Don't get me wrong. It's normal for a business to want to make the money. Just stop with the overly transparent euphemisms already.

What we are discussing here however is directly related to these prices. If you feel the prices that were stated misrepresent you feel free to correct or annotate them. Feel free also to add a disclaimer if you feel the need. Just removing the information however is imho not a good idea. Before you know it people will resort to discussing touchy subjects (or maybe even all subjects) on a different forum all together. I am sure nobody wants that.

I also have doubts about the survivability of OS in large corporations/enterprises. It's all-in-one approach is fantastic in certain scenarios but in an enterprise setting it is a problem. Enterprises usually have strict guidelines in place (the ones I have worked for anyway) with regards to deployment, revisioning, bug tracking, log tracking, etc... OS simply offers too little in terms of interfacing with such guidelines/policies. The SU approach alas also doesn't help much here.

Cheers,
Hans

Hindsight, the 15K is just peanuts for the simple maintenance and aftermath of the OutSystemss-projects.

Imho, certain countries are simply blinded by the fact of licence-costs while the costs of maintenance is much much more obscure and with outsystems it will get transparent again.
There lies the power of Outsystems. The easyness of maintainability.

But tbh, for (most)  managers I know, they don't care. They care about their project-budget and trying to hide the years of maintenance aftewards. because they are not there anymore.

Hello Antonio, you are right about pricing. 15.000€ per year is big amount for starter.

€15000/year is way too much for most portuguese SMEs, so yeah, it is a problem.

I get what J.J. says, that it is better to have (fewer) bigger clients, than (lots of) smaller clients, but that's not really that simple, especially in a not-so-well-off country like Portugal.

Also, I'm pretty sure that there must be some accomodation for currency differences, paying around R$40000/year just for the OS license is way too much for most brazilian companies, even the not so small ones.