Consideration for a Pricing Page on the Sakai LMS Website

[Kunal Jaykam]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask about the absence of a pricing page on the Sakai LMS website, as it’s something that I always look for on the websites often, when I am exploring software options for my personal use. I’ve also noticed that, like us, some other LMS providers ( Canvas or D2L) also don’t display public pricing. This made me wonder if our decision not to show pricing is due to the specific needs of our target audience or if it is an industry standard for LMS providers.

It seems that by not showing prices upfront, we may leave one part of the LMS comparison process out. Pricing is only revealed when potential clients engage directly with sales, which may have its benefits. However, I think since Sakai is an open-source project, adding transparency around pricing could be beneficial.

I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

Best,
Kunal Jaykam

[Wilma Hodges]

Hi Kunal,

In my experience, LMS sites typically don't provide pricing information for institution-level clients. You may find some LMS-type products that provide prices for individual or small group subscribers, but anything larger than a single instructor/class often says "contact us for enterprise pricing" or something to that effect. 

I believe this is due to the nature of LMS contracts at most institutions. The LMS tends to be selected via an RFP process, often by committee, and pricing is included in the proposal applications when vendors engage in that process. Also, pricing may vary depending on the client. Some institutions negotiate multi-year contracts with specially agreed-upon price increases over that time. Some institutions may belong to consortia or other state-wide or regional groups which negotiate pricing for all members at a volume discount. 

In the case of Sakai, pricing is even more variable, since there are additional factors involved. Are they self-hosted, commercially hosted, or self-hosted with commercial support? If they are commercially hosted, where are they hosted? In the US, Europe, or elsewhere? (AWS or GovCloud pricing may vary.) Hosted pricing for Sakai is usually determined by the number of users in the system, but that can vary as well depending on the expected usage. Is it a traditional higher-ed scenario with students taking 3 or 4 courses a term? Or is it a professional development scenario where user concurrency is much lower or higher than that? Is it a vanilla Sakai install, or is it highly customized with many local enhancements? All of those things have a significant impact on the cost of running and maintaining a Sakai instance. Therefore, the answer to most pricing inquiries is "it depends." If interested prospects contact us for pricing, I typically send them some ball park information and try to get more specifics from them so that we can provide a more accurate quote for their use case. Or, I forward them to other commercial affiliates like EDF who I imagine do the same.

I'm not opposed to making pricing info more transparent, but I do think it is easier said than done. 

Wilma

Wilma Hodges, Ed.D., UXC

Director of Training & eLearning Initiatives

Longsight, Inc.

wi...@longsight.com 

www.longsight.com

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[Matthew Jones]

Sakai is free open source software, there is no cost to use it and no pricing. The hosting and services do have a cost and that would be up to each commercial affiliate if they want to be upfront or not about their pricing. There's a lot of variables as mentioned by Wilma.

The only LMS vendor I've seen (though there are probably more smallers ones) with upfront pricing is Moodle Cloud. But as Wilma mentions, their public pricing tops off at 750 users which is less than most schools need. Beyond that you have to get a custom quote. At one time I believe some affiliates were considering putting up a "per-course" or small group pricing but I don't know if any have and don't know if there was ever any demand for that. There would also need to be a new tool or system designed to actively monitor usage created. 

Apereo Membership including addons to support individual projects do have published pricing but is optional for organizations to contribute to. I'm not sure if the Sakai website mentions how you can support Sakai explicitly but including those could be good.. 

We have also considered getting Github Sponsors setup for Sakai, but never worked through the details of that with Apereo so the button just allows for individual sponsors and directs people to the Apereo page to contribute. I'm not sure if anyone has sponsored through that link. 

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[Kunal Jaykam]

Thanks for the explanation! I now see how complex pricing can get based on each institution’s unique needs.

I've always been on the user side of software, not on the provider’s end, so I really appreciate you helping me understand it.

Maybe we could consider having a pricing page that explains the factors that determine pricing based on specific needs and highlights the services our affiliates, like Longsight or EDF, can offer.

[Charles Severance]

Hi all,

Thanks Kunal for the comment / idea.  I have been thinking about this a lot lately while helping my brother find an open source archival system.  We found a really cool product called Omeka:

https://www.omeka.net/

This is an open source project, it is truly open source and many of its customers download and tun many instances.  I downloaded it and got it running on my laptop - it is PHP and eaasy to install and configure.  But for my brother, he started with a hosted version.  If you look at and scroll down, you can see the prices.

https://www.omeka.net/signup

Jonathan started with the free hosted version (similar to TrySakai), then went to the $35/year and I think is now working on the $300 / year.  With this you get to send email to their equivalent of Wilma and get a few questions.  You also can ask the community for help but that is kind of jumping into the deep end because the community (like us) is usually deep in issues converting from their “Classic” version to their “S version”   Sound familiar?

Bringing these ideas in to our community, I would start with several observations.

- We really only have one commercial company doing of Sakai.  Historically we had more than one  but things have settled into Longsight as the professional Sakai hosting provider.

- We already have a “free Sakai”, we already have small Sakai in the form of LAMP, and we also have medium-large enterprise Sakai.   All these come from Longsight these days.   Back in the LAMP days there *was* a pricing like document - it was not super public but you could get it and it had numbers.  Sam and Martin built a cool system that makes small customers tractable.

What I propose is that we (the PMC) formally approve Longsight as the preferred provider for Sakai and let them edit a pricing page on www.sakailms.com.  They can put whatever pricing they are comfortable with on that page.  If other commercial providers want in - we can cross that bridge when we get there.

Another model is Moodle.com - I am a customer of Moodle.com 

https://moodle.com/solutions/moodlecloud/

I am paying $300 per year so I can have a dedicated test / demo server for my demo and other interoperability work.  Our LTI partners couls pay $500 or even more per year to get a server and access to our core team.  Folks could pay us $2000 per year to be on a LTI tools page in www.sakailms.org.

I think we need to something like this.  If a tree falls in a forest and there is no price for it - it does not exist.  Back in 2006 being pure open source was practical. Since 2015 - that was no longer a tractable position.

I own www.sakaicloud.com / www.sakaicloud.org and am happy to dedicate those names to this effort.

/Chuck

[Bernardo Garcia Vila]

Hello,

Just for the record, as Kunal said EDF also provides a professional Sakai hosting and has clients all over the world. Not sure if the omission was because Longsight usually covers the US market but it's important to clarify that.

(Maybe my message appears twice, sorry if that's the case)

Regards.

[Charles Severance]

Bernie,

Thanks - I stand corrected.

I am pretty sure that someone (might have been Salva) told me that EDF did not do hosting. Knowing tht EDF does hosting is good news to me. A US company as the only option for hosting is not a good situation to be in. And I am glad EDF has revenue that is not just developer services. Multiple kindof of revenue is better than one. So I am very happy to be corrected.

There also may be an effort in Japan that is coming up - so we need to do something multi vendor.

I think the right way to go is to see if any of the vendors are willing to put at least an approximate price for 750 users. We could have a page that at the top has the pricing for a limited sized install and each vendor’s price - then for “enterprise deployments” just list the vendors.

And while I have put words into Longsight’s mouth - they are not on board yet :)

This is just brainstorming at this point :)

/Chuck

[Wilma Hodges]

Actually, following Martin Ramsay's recent retirement, Longsight took over LAMP and we currently have the following page on the Longsight website: https://www.longsight.com/lamp/  We kept the LAMP name, and the same pricing levels that Martin previously offered so as to keep things consistent for current members. When folks contact me through the SakaiLMS website looking for small group hosting, I usually send them to that page. I don't know if EDF has a similar page, but I typically forward Spanish inquiries to Salva.

Wilma 

Wilma Hodges, Ed.D., UXC

Director of Training & eLearning Initiatives

Longsight, Inc.

wi...@longsight.com 

www.longsight.com

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