Our organization, as well as many others, have had issues with OutSystems and their licensing practices. Ignoring recent issues of OutSystems performing aggressive and sudden price increases, they need to create a new licensing model for their On Premise licensing. Currently they use the exact same license plans for both On Premise and Cloud hosted, which is illogical. They are not the same thing, so why do they use the same license pricing structure. Organizations which choose On Premise do so with the expectation that they will need to pay significantly more upfront for the physical systems/servers that will be hosting the applications, as well as maintenance cost for this infrastructure. As far as OutSystems in concerned, it does not matter if an On Premise installation has 1 app with a single screen, or 100 apps with 10000 AO's. None of this effects OutSystems in any way. As such, OutSystems needs to adopt a different pricing strategy for On Premise. Since things like AO's or End Users don't matter for On Premise, the obvious change would be to base platform cost. A higher base cost for the platform would offset some of the cost of current AO usage, while not providing artificial limitations on the customers own physical infrastructure. It just does not make ANY sense that someone has to pay extra in license fees to use their own physical infrastructure when they have already paid the base platform license cost. We have to constantly cut corners and limit our development because of the additional license cost for the AO's. Our account rep has told us before that OutSytems is currently "at cost" with their on premise AO model, which is just a flat out lie. It's impossible to be "at cost" when the size of our internal database has literally zero impact on OutSystems bottom line.
I am just hoping to create some transparency about our grievances with the platform and to allow others to chime in as well. The chances that anyone from OutSystems reads or cares about this are slim, but they are literally losing customers because of their poor licensing options (we have had multiple personal discussions with potential customers looking to adopt OutSystems since we have been a long time customer and early adopter in our market space, and we have convinced all of them to avoid OutSystems for various reasons, mostly surrounding their licensing and poor practices with renewals).
We made similar arguments when my old employer received a most unwelcome renewal proposal which eliminated the unlimited AO model and increased our spend by almost 3x. I'm sure at the heart of it was some ridiculous private equity mandate, but doing less while charging more isn't what I'd call a viable value proposition.
OutSystems faces improving competition, a lagging internal software development strategy, and has responded with an adversarial approach to renewals with existing customers. Their product isn't ubiquitous, like the cash cow Oracle database their new sales management used to fall back on. They need positive, trusting relationships if they are to grow the platform's install base...and frankly, it is staggering how content they are to set fire to their existing customer relationships and watch them burn. They smugly play the "since you've developed all these apps on our platform, we've got you by the <insert body part> now" card, and people hate them for it.
So, sadly I can't bring OutSystems to my new employer simply because I don't trust them.
Hi Alexander Stump,
You summarized well the poor situation where OS customers are right now. All that you said plus the impending push from OS to migrate from O11 to ODC, without any accompanying support tools - it appears we'll essentially be embarking on a new project from the ground up - prompted our decision to reluctantly transition to a different low-code solution.
Regarding your statement "without any accompanying support tools", this isn't completely true, as documented here: https://success.outsystems.com/documentation/11/outsystems_11_to_odc_migration/
And they are working on the tooling to support the documented migrations steps.