I just recently discovered a very cool company, outsystems. They had a community edition that you could install on premises. Well of course the timing is against me, and the very last version of the community edition just came out đŸ˜¦ they are moving to a cloud model
So next I tried to figure out if a small to medium sized business could afford the software. Well you know what they say… if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. They are very proud of their software. It seems that they are aiming for Enterprise customers (it looks like the previous licensing model use to be more small to mid friendly) Â
From what I can tell unless you can pay around 30K – 50K a year this is not the solution for you.
Michael Ellerbeck 
Hi Michael,
I work for OutSystems and I was a part of the (big) team that recently launched our new personal environments. This is what you refer to the cloud model, I believe.
We (obviously đŸ™‚ also think our technology is super cool, and we want everybody in the world to use to solve their problems – from small personal apps, to super complex mission critical applications!
When I read your post, I felt like reaching out to help and to get some feedback on why the personal environments won’t work for you. When we decided to stop updating the community edition, we wanted to give people and even better option going forward. If that is not your case, we’d like to hear from you. Could you contact us via success@outsystems.com so we can help out?
Thanks
Gonçalo
My concern is that there seems to be a hole in the pricing structure. For example my use case would be to create very simple update a table or two kind of apps, these would connect to internal databases, the devices would not have access to the internet so the cloud (PE) wouldn’t really work for that. But at 30K a year this just doesn’t make sense.
I guess its not just that the community edition is going away, it’s that there isn’t a way to buy outsystems lite. Something like a vmware type of 3 server starter pack??
It does depend on your strategy though, it seems like you are focusing on large enterprises, which is fine, but there are a whole lot of small to medium sized businesses that don’t have developers on staff (or they are not full time developers) who would love to utilize the rapid development platform but are being priced out of it. I do a zillion different things from storage to virtualization to development. I like buying tools that increase my efficiency, for example one cool tool we use is Altova Mapforce. I can easily clear this purchase because its under the 10K threshold. If I go to my boss with a 30K all he does is laugh at me.
Have a look at http://www.ebasetech.com
You het suckef on with an amaxing free perdonal environment development space. You can launch and depliy your app on android and ios. All good so far
However as soon as you get more than 30 users msybe a few more. You will have to upgrade your development space from personal to enterprize and that WILL COST YOU $40,000, YES ITS SEROUSLY AND PROHIBIATIVE EXPENSR HOLY JERPERS. I GOT CAUGHT OUT AND BURNT BADLY. I had to start my project agaon from scratch .
Its my own fault i did not read all the brochure material
Tool is good, but too expensive compared to other tools out there. Windev for example cost around 2K for the tool, doing almost the same. I now use an opensource tool since I don’t think this tool is priced for a small dev office, and the alternative allow me to edit the code in Eclipse for free. Right now my app runs with around 2000 concurrent users per day and growing, cost with servers per year on an LB works out less than 10K (Which btw I would have to pay on top of the tool price in anyway).
I don’t like the idea that they have a pricing section on the site with no actual pricing information. If I chose to use the free edition on their cloud and my user workload forced me to upgrade it would have been a disaster if I didn’t know the price upfront.
Can you tell me what open source tool you have chosen? Thanks