Forum OpenACS Q&A: Contracts: OpenACS pricing and costs

I'm looking to get a sense of costs and pricing by building and operating OpenACS Community Systems. I am particularly interested in systems on the "lower cost and higher profit" end for small and medium sized businesses.

We have up to this point been very happy with OpenACS 3.x, and Postgresql hosted inexpensively on our own box at cros.net. In one sense, this is not "real world" because it never would have happened if we didn't have the OpenSource choices becaue the budget was very limited.

I remember from the past that ArsDigita was charging some high-end clients $30,000 per month and they were using Oracle.

I seem to remember a typical price for smaller projects is about $5,000. per month. These are US$.

Would anyone be willing to share their pricing and cost experiences for using this toolkit on projects that they know about?

Ok, it's not as simple as a single number, there is the host, server, onetime and ongoing development and maintainance, community size, "pocket size" of the client, etc. What I'm looking for is guidelines.

What about pricing for dotLRN?

If you feel uncomfortable sharing on this forum, please reply directly to me at openacs@rocnet.com. Naturally, I would hope that members will share their experiences here so we can all benefit!

THANK YOU.

-Bob

From my experience, the actual hosting part is the easiest to quantify.  My company, ZillNet charges about $175 per month for a managed server dedicated to just one customer (basically a leased server colocated at our premises), running OpenACS/Postgres, with 30GB bandwidth included.  Others charge more or less than that.

The shared server pricing we are currently in the midst of re-working but the new plan will start at about $20 or $25 per month and include some form of SSL (use your own certificate or use secure.zill.net/yourcompany for free).

Development costs are all over the map.  For basic customization with existing functionality, such as stock OACS 4.6 + custom templating (say forums, ecommerce, and one or two other packages) I would not be surprised to see someone offering a menu-priced package(i.e. any three modules) for about $1000.  For more than that, expect development costs to grow steeply.

Oracle seems to add to the pricing a multiple from 2 to 4 times in terms of hosting charges; but I would not expect developing an Oracle-only package to cost much more than a Postgres-only package.

dotLRN and dotWRK are too new to see much data on, yet.

Overall, I feel that as the toolkit progresses the cost of getting a basic site up and running will decrease due to templating cleanup alone.

Sometimes as a developer you would like to charge a price for the all work and other times is better to have per hour fee, also depends on what is exactly your work, a module that you already know or something that you haven't seen before. Everything is time / knowledge dependent.

The basic functionality + custom template could be around on what Patrick says. For a dedicated server I think a good one for openacs/dotlrn is around $200 +- per month (and maybe this server could handle more that one service). Then you just need to care about bandwidth.

The maintainance should not be to high but that depend what do you call "maintainance", openacs issues and OS issues? or just openacs. The ongoing development is sometimes difficult to arrange (to have a price that do not affect your clients wallet in the long term), and also it depend on what are the future plans for the website.

Note: It all depends! giving you a price without knowing what we are talking about is like saying to a constructor "Build me a wall, how much it will cost?" and you haven't specified to the constructor what kind of materials do you want, what are the dimensions, etc....

I'm very confident that a "lower cost and higher profit" is what should be called openacs and their sons. No matter what, you won't find sophisticated tools like this without licence payment.