That's a little difficult because the licensing costs are different depending on the type of probe that you have. We typically don't get involved in the commercial side, but the list price is probably something like $3,000 for a small probe. However, that gives all of the features that the probe can do, whether or not you use them. In the old days, up until two or three years ago, each of the separate features was a separately licensable module so that you could add things that you wanted, and you didn't have to add things that you didn't want. They've changed all that now, and everything the probe can do is a part of the base license. It's a bit tricky to specify the pricing because if you do use all of the features, which we don't, then it's really good value for money, but as there's nothing else like it, it's still an essential purchase. We don't seem to have any problem with customers seeing the value in paying that.

The small probe is probably around $3,000 and the very large probe that they make for massive data centers might be $50,000 or $60,000. It's a subscription model, so the payment is per year. 

One of the other products that we looked at was ThousandEyes, and we specifically didn't go for that. It has some similarities to AppNeta, but we specifically did not go for that because it had a very unpredictable licensing model. In that, you had to decide how many times you wanted to run a test. If you decide you are going to run a test every five minutes, and that becomes not good enough and you then want to change the testing to every one minute, effectively, you use up five times the number of licenses. It's very unpredictable what the cost of the ThousandEyes product is going to be. With the type of work we do, testing once every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes is nowhere near adequate.

It's good value for money, depending on the use case.

It's worth the money.

I inherited this from a different version, and I haven't yet gone through a renewal because we had purchased three years upfront. So, to me, that still remains to be seen. Once it comes up for renewal, we'll see what happens. Especially because now it is Broadcom, it is going to change anyway.

I find the solution's price to be fairly good. In terms of the price, what I heard about ThousandEyes was a bit too much, but I found AppNeta by Broadcom was a product with pretty good pricing.

I have never compared the pricing with competitors, because that is handled by our sales team. But in my opinion, Broadcom software is always a little expensive because they provide quality.

Certainly nothing is free. No one gives anything away. If you want something you have to pay for it, but at the same time I think that it is very wise as a customer always to keep that mindset where we want to make sure that every dollar that we are investing, we are getting the best return.

Sometimes maybe it is better to deploy three less and give yourself room to grow. Deploy seven and give yourself lots of time to pay additional attention to those seven rather than deploy 10 units and stretch yourself out a little bit and also assume the additional costs.

No other company has been able to match AppNeta's capability at the same price point. Licensing is easy to understand and generate / apply.

My comments here are applicable to any vendor or service provider: define your use-case and clearly link product features with intended results--particularly with regards to the expectations of those who are paying the bill--if you do that effectively, it should provide you with a blueprint to guide your licensing choices. Then, don't confuse cost with value: if something is cheap but gives you a low-priority result then it really has little value; and on the other hand something that has a high cost but gives a high-priority result is still very valuable.

I advise to look at both pricing models and pick that one that makes the most sense for your organization. Both solutions work depending on your goals. We have found AppNeta flexible and easy to work with for both licensing and pricing and willing to work with us.

AppNeta by Broadcom is not expensive. 

When you add licenses – sync them with the existing ones in regards to runtime, otherwise billing becomes complex.

I am not fully in contact with the pricing and licensing aspects since they were handled by someone else.

It’s more expensive than other tools, but it’s also priced differently because of the cloud solution. Basically, we pay a recurring yearly maintenance cost for licenses and appliances, but we don’t have to buy servers or do any of the maintenance because they live at AppNeta (via the cloud). Thus, I don’t have to purchase or maintain servers.