Ask HN: What is the most expensive off-the-shelf software you have seen?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41518797

by fire_lake • 2 years ago

38 73 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I’m curious what is the most expensive off-the-shelf software you have seen?

I expect the answer to be some obscure B2B CAD program? Or perhaps an RDMS?

I realise it can be hard to compare due to difference in pricing models - pay per seat, pay per month, pay one off - but I think we can still have a good discussion.

Zealotux• 2 years ago

The Bloomberg Terminal costs $27,660 a year (or $24k a year per user), and it's difficult to disrupt because most users are attracted by the built-in "social network" and access to a lot of premium data and features in one place.

namdnay2• 2 years ago

yes I think that per seat BBG is probably the most expensive off the shelf software

GianFabien3• 2 years ago

You have to remember those terminals are used by people who earn USD1M+ with bonuses. Which in turn means that they have to make their employer at least USD10M+ per person. Their expense accounts for entertaining clients, in a month exceeds the annual cost for the Bloomberg terminal.

curiousgal• 2 years ago

lol I don't mean to be dismissive but that's not necessarily true. A lot of people have bbg terminals, even back office personnel with relatively modest salaries. They need it for their work as well.

marban• 2 years ago

Also, keep the hardware connection in mind; even though it's no longer as dominant as before.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 2 years ago

What is it?

GianFabien3• 2 years ago

I'm not a mainframe guy. I have only worked with enterprise scale Unix (AIX, HPUX, Solaris) deployments. Oracle ERP used by a multi-national manufacturer. SAP ERP used by a different multi-national and also at several government departments. Of course, these systems are also require Oracle RDBMS or IBM DB2.

The systems that I have personally worked with have all been in the $5M+ range. But that is just for the software licenses. There also are an army of very well paid consultants tasked with customising the system to the clients requirements. And then there is the enterprise hardware from IBM, HP or Sun (now Oracle).

agos2• 2 years ago

not really off the shelf if you buy a license from a salesperson and have people customize it for you

namdnay2• 2 years ago

What do you mean by "off the shelf"? Sold without custom development? If so, a lot of enterprise software is sold "off the shelf" to small/medium customers

GianFabien3• 2 years ago

Even SME versions of SAP ERP require customisation.

b112• 2 years ago

Cadence software has various per-seat licensing schemes with a license manager. One can check out tokens to get enough for specific tasks, or in some cases needs specialized licenses.

Not sure about today, but there were licenses for highly specialized stuff for ONE seat @ $150k/year. Most were $30k/year.

wenbin• 2 years ago

I'd start with a public company that has very few customers.

For example, Palantir

robertkoss• 2 years ago

Not true, you can sign up for Foundry today and pay per compute second / storage second. It is pay per use.

Of course big companies sign huge deals for discounts, but that is the same for Snowflake, Databricks, etc.

jack1243star• 2 years ago

What is the definition of "off-the-shelf"?

Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?

bob1029• 2 years ago

If we are including ready-made B2B products, your high score will probably come from some obscure semiconductor, healthcare, banking, insurance or logistics vendor. Much of the cost is then about consulting & configuring more than any specific code pile.

Top of my mind right now would be the EDA tools used by semiconductor designers.

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

That is not off the shelf.

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

What is the definition of "off-the-shelf"?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/off-the-...

Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?

No.

barrkel• 2 years ago

It's definitely blurry, because as the price escalates companies will want a human in the relationship for multiple reasons: price discrimination / market segmentation, onboarding (perhaps with professional service for configuration) to make sure you get bedded in and don't quit early, product management conversations to inform feature development, temperature checks to get early warning signs of churn, etc.

dataintellect• 2 years ago

kdb+/q - only hedge funds/investment banks use it.

fragmede• 2 years ago

SOLIDWORKS comes to mind. It's roughly $5,000 a seat per year. CATIA is also from the same company (3DS) and is $8,000/yr.

There's also Photoshop, Resolume, and TouchDesigner, which are expensive, but nowhere near "the most".

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

Ansys can also be very expensive. Although it also seems very variable. I've heard of smaller shops paying between $7k and $30k/year.

triggercut2• 2 years ago

I've seen fully loaded Ansys go for over $30k but yearly maintenance would have been maybe $15k, however this was over 10 years ago.

... And let's not forget the the $30k workstation needed to run it too.

scottapotamas• 2 years ago

As CAD tools go SW is on the lower end of the scale. Though the price increases have been feeling pretty abusive in the recent years.

Creo has come down relative to it's ProE days and is priced similarly to SW(?), and I believe NX still starts at double to triple per seat.

ANSYS (specifically Fluent) and similar simulation tools have eyewatering per-seat prices, though I'm a little out of date to know if they're less horrible about multicore licences etc.

re-thc2• 2 years ago

Oracle!

Delphiza• 2 years ago

Don't know why you are getting downvoted. OP also mentioned RDBMS as an option.

I don't think that people understand how expensive Oracle gets. Larry Ellison is the 9th wealthiest person in the world (US$137B). You don't get that kind of wealth by selling cheap software.

politelemon2• 2 years ago

It also comes with a post sales "audit" cost.

re-thc2• 2 years ago

I don't think that people understand how expensive Oracle gets.

And the actual real value it provides. Oracle, the database is actually useful. It's possibly the best (or close to) in the market if you've got a large amount of data and need its feature set.

_7acn• 2 years ago

Alias|Wavefront Maya Unlimited (now Autodesk Maya)

flohofwoe• 2 years ago

Autodesk Maya is currently about $1900 per year and seat, with some more esoteric Autodesk products going much higher:

https://www.autodesk.com/products

UE5 has a seat-based subscription model in the same ballpark:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license

lll-o-lll• 2 years ago

Creo Design Engineering Professional

$29,400, floating license (Annual).

Engineering 3D Cad modelling/design tool. I learned it when it was called Pro Engineer at University.

v9v• 2 years ago

Similarly, some versions of Siemens NX (another CAD program) can go up to $45000 according to this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/SiemensNX/comments/ws66tm/whats_the...

linker30002• 2 years ago

Adobe wanted £24K for a ColdFusion maintenance licence. We were code frozen into an old version and didn't actually need any support or upgrades as we were migrating to a new and different platform. They also wanted another £24K for the dev instance we retained in case any issues turned up with our old code. Adobe had changed licensing terms and so dev instances needed full licencing too. This instance was spun down for most of the time.

In effect, they wanted £48K for nothing.

Yes, Lucee was in our future, but I left before that came to be.

About 3yr after leaving that company, Adobe tracked me down via LinkedIn and my personal Web site and messaged me using my personal email address to put them back in touch directly with someone at my old job who could pick up licence negotiations.

I told them to phone Head Office - they said they'd done that but had not received a return call. I very politely told them to fu....go away as it was not my problem.

dijit2• 2 years ago

What’s Luci (for the uninitiated)?

politelemon2• 2 years ago

This I believe, it accepts Cold Fusion Markup Language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucee

linker30002• 2 years ago

My typo. Should have been Lucee (corrected)

https://docs.lucee.org/guides/updating-lucee/migrate-from-ac...

altyne• 2 years ago

IBM

dijit2• 2 years ago

Maya comes to mind; total cost for my small team ended up more than an entire artists salary.

Another that comes to mind was when I was forced to buy “Mindmanager” and was shocked at the cost. Even the base licence was something like €1600/u/year; but the extensions are required, and paid.

Theres a bunch of “top” items of things, gitlab ultimate and sourcegraph being €99/u/m come to mind, which are off the shelf, and actually useful even for frugal people like myself.

yen223• 2 years ago

when I was forced to buy “Mindmanager”

Under what circumstance would you be forced to buy a mind-mapping software? Sorry, I am really curious about this now.

mrjay422• 2 years ago

Half serious/Half Joke

- The Sims 4

Total cost is around 1200$ (with ALL DLCs, packs, etc.)

https://www.thegamer.com/the-sims-4-base-game-all-dlc-cost/

taspeotis• 2 years ago

I think the train simulators have that beat.

mrjay422• 2 years ago

Oh yeah! Train Sim would be above 9K€ (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/bsyd5i/tot...)

Now that I think of it...DCS, the flight simulator -> buying the whole thing, would cost a little above 3K€ (source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/223750/discussions/5/38759693...)

Also, Star Citizen, the biggest pledges (you don't technically NEED to pay with real money, you could try to farm the content ingame) -> anyway, it's probably around 10K€ or 20K€ total. But that's going to be contested by some who will claim that you're not buying content, you're pledging money to the game. Fact is: you pay for a ship, you get the ship -> pledge or not, that looks like buying to me. (Source: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge ; https://robertsspaceindustries.com/store/pledge/browse/game-... )

tikhonj• 2 years ago

Before Microsoft released the Z3 SMT solver under an MIT license, you could buy a commercial license for it for $9999 from the Microsoft online store, just like you'd buy a copy of Windows or Office, or, for that matter, an XBox.

Of course, that's nowhere near as expensive as lots of other enterprise software, but it was as "off-the-shelf" as you could get short of your local Fry's or Best Buy. No "call us for details" pricing, per-core licensing, recurring subscriptions and support contracts... just old-fashioned software sold directly as a product.

Unfortunately, I can't find screenshots now, so I'm just going off my hazy memories and the details might be a bit off :P

agos2• 2 years ago

back in 2003 I saw an ad for Vienna Sound Library, a state of the art sample library for symphonic instruments. At the time, it was way already way out of my league, but the product has since grown and now the bundle sits at €10450 - the bundle for the pianos is €3195 by itself

pembrook• 2 years ago

Just search “software companies ranked by total revenue” and pick the ones that are exclusively Enterprise or Government focused (eg. Oracle, Palantir, SAP, Any ERP in general, etc). Those will be the most expensive software products you can buy.

Enterprise software can easily get into 10s of millions per year for licensing plus implementation and consulting fees.

Or if you’re talking pure licensing on a per user basis, easily $10k-$50k per user annually.

JodieBenitez• 2 years ago

It's really data disguised as software but I worked in the automotive retail and some companies sell access to database with parts info through a web portal. Can't remember the exact price but it's in the tens of thousand €/year for a single access. I can remember someone was in charge to queue requests to this database, as a lot of people in the company needed parts info.

heisenzombie• 2 years ago

It’s quite easy to spend 30k+ per license for some kinds of finite-element analysis software, particularly if you want lots of multi-physics capabilities (COMSOL) or it’s targeting some niche (superconducting quench analysis, some kinds of RF analysis etc)

Aeolun• 2 years ago

Is this stuff actually so hard to build? Or so boring to work on that only a few people in the world want to?

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

Very likely the reality that only a few companies or parties need it. So you have very limited number of buyers so those buyers have to cover the costs.

merizian• 2 years ago

You can buy a commercial license for OpenPose for $25K/year https://cmu.flintbox.com/technologies/b820c21d-8443-4aa2-a49...

patapong• 2 years ago

Nice try, Sam Altman ;)

znpy• 2 years ago

One i personally bought was SecureCRT, I am quite fond of it. It costs 250-300 euros though. It's worth such price, though.

devjab• 2 years ago

I’m not sure Microsoft counts as off the shelf software because of the way licenses are structured, but if you buy a windows enterprise with office365 for your organisation it’s easily a few millions a year. Even for relatively small enterprises. It’s not the individual license that is necessarily expensive. It’s the total volume of licenses. They are divided into different license tiers and some users will cost much more than others, but it’s also something you where you’ll typically buy some sort of licenses for everyone.

This is unlike most other enterprise software. A lot of it has really expensive per user licenses, but if you’re only buying the full Adobe licenses for a couple of employees then it’s not really that expensive, at least not on the over all IT budget.

gsck• 2 years ago

Syncronym Depence comes to mind once you add in all the bells an whistles like its control module and fountain module, easily well over $11k https://shop.syncronorm.com/5-software

wysiwyg doesn't have quite the same bells and whistles but is $2k+ a year for just lighting previz https://cast-soft.com/wysiwyg-lighting-design/#compare

yread• 2 years ago

OpenSpecimen (biobank sample management database, you could probably write it in a weekend or two) costs 150.000 USD on their pricing page

https://www.openspecimen.org/pricing/

RGamma• 2 years ago

Surely it wouldn't be this expensive if it was that easy to replace?

alexwasserman• 2 years ago

At one company an excel add-in with a >$1M support cost was found to have a single user.

Turned out to be the CEO so we have to keep paying for it.

Back around 2009ish the company I was at sold a single enterprise license for our software for $10M. Average deal size then was probably in the $500k-$2M range.

readyforbrunch• 2 years ago

For us it was okta. Not only in their subscription cost, but also because using okta meant we had to upgrade most of our SaaS subscriptions to their enterprise package.

Got rid of it, hired 2 people with a small portion of the budget that was freed up and never looked back.

m_x• 2 years ago

Petroleum Expert gave 10 licenses for the Move software [1] to my University for an advertised value of 1 872 218 £ [2].

It's not clear, but for what I recall, it wasn't even permanent licenses.

[1] https://www.petex.com/pe-geology/move-suite/

[2] https://phitem.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/presentation/actus-ufr...

davidguetta• 2 years ago

My friend sells 300k / year licenses for his tax optimisation ai program to to french companies

Ekaros2• 2 years ago

Hmm, did not see price list but I would guess Defensics... Which for every suite would get really expensive.

Seems like approximately 10k per suite, per seat, but I think there is some room for negotiation.

ddmf• 2 years ago

There was a QS tool that was in use by a council 20+ years back that cost about £15,000 per seat.

The serial dongle that they used - possibly hasp iirc - hadn't been implemented correctly, so ultimately where was a CMP EAX,1 / JNZ that was easy to NOP.

barryrandall• 2 years ago

Back when I bought such things, SQL Server Enterprise Edition was about $30k per CPU socket, Oracle about $40k.

lostmsu• 2 years ago

I heard of cryptocurrency code analysis tools with $250k/y+ licenses

leros• 2 years ago

When I was in college, I took an integrated circuit design class. I was told the software we used was around $1M per license. We had to go into the lab and use Sun computers to use it.

jareklupinski• 2 years ago

There was this radio propagation mapping software that would show you how far a wireless signal could go if you placed the antenna somewhere in the world and gave it some parameters.

You purchased preset 'lots' of about a square mile containing accurate terrain data to run the simulations, and if you were interested in an area that saddled two patches, you had to buy both (iirc you couldn't just specify arbitrary coordinates).

I had to spend some time figuring out how few patches we needed to make it 'worth it', but I don't remember the final figure; it must have been in the 5 digits all said and done?

bradgranath• 2 years ago

Auto dealer information systems (the thing that replaced Factory Service Manuals for cars 15ish years ago).

You used to be able to pick up a series of 4 or 5 technical manuals from the manufacturer of your car for 100-200 bucks.

Now, with everything the cloud, they want subscription fees.

$1400 a year for Toyota Information Systems. $1600 a year for Stellantis wiTech. $2200 a year for Volvo TechInfo.

All for access to a database of PDFs.

dver• 2 years ago

As other have said, PLM and CAD tools are very pricey.

Palantir is a recent hight water mark I've seen as well.

BXlnt2EachOther• 2 years ago

Variation on "have seen" - a couple examples of historically expensive software that became accessible:

Over time DaVinci Resolve went from a hardware-software system costing $X00,000 to having a software-only version for $1500 in today's dollars to having two tiers, a free version and $295 "studio" version that is also bundled in with BlackMagic hardware and cameras.

($800,000 to Zero - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvP5_HFQSk)

I suppose a half-million-dollar hybrid system might not be off the shelf. For things individual users could actually (edit: realistically) buy, the perpetual Adobe Collection license was $3k in today-money.

For Mac users, Final Cut Pro Studio 1 was $1299 and Logic Studio used to be $999, plus paid major version upgrades; probably multiply by 1.5x for inflation; now they're $299 and $199, or IIRC $299 together in a bundle for students, and they've each received free updates for a decade.

satya71• 2 years ago

Most semiconductor EDA software cost > $10k per seat, sometimes > $100k per seat.

shortrounddev2• 2 years ago

Maya

threeseed• 2 years ago

Was a WebObjects developer back in the late 90s: $100k/license adjusted for inflation.

Out of the box arguably still better than today’s web stacks.

oceanjams• 2 years ago

Bitcoin, but I can't seem to make it do anything.

triggercut2• 2 years ago

I was a CAD manager for various multi-disciplinary engineering firms in my early career, I can attest to some of the accounts regarding various CAD systems already mentioned.

One not mentioned that comes to mind is E-tap, used by electrical engineers. Well into the five figure territory once all the various bells and whistles were added.

However the most expensive software I ever saw in the wild was some little known simulation platform for a mathematician running predictive models (it also did this with 3D graphics, so both senses of the term) on mine/rail/port operational scenarios. That was into low six figures a seat and five in annual maintenance.

Ask HN: What is the most expensive off-the-shelf software you have seen?

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