The solution is free. We don't have to pay for licensing.

As a user of the solution, we pay a fee. The amount depends on the kind of office license a user buys. The fees are paid yearly. We have an enterprise-level agreement with Microsoft at this time.

It can be expensive for on-premises deployments, especially when you have to support SQL Server as your backend database. That's where the cost comes into play. SQL Server has its own licensing, which Microsoft keeps on changing. Therefore, it can become costly. 

In the earlier versions of SharePoint, version 2007 or 2010, they had an express version where the SQL Server licensing was free. It wasn't like a full-blown SharePoint. It was only a slimmed-down version. It used to be whatever your hardware costs. You would install the free software and work with it, but you were very limited in what you could do in SharePoint. If you wanted the SharePoint Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, then you had to pay more to get the SQL Server license based on the number of users or servers.

The subscription model is different for cloud deployments. Licensing is per user and per month. The cost also depends on the storage required. If you have a lot of sites or documents, then you need to expand it based on your needs.

I think we have a corporate license for SharePoint. We have a special arrangement with Microsoft because we are a reseller for pretty much most of the Microsoft products. Whatever our pricing is will probably not be like the standard model.  

The licensing model for SharePoint 2013 and 2016 is more efficient than the 2010 version because they removed the internet edition, which was the most expensive.

There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider.

Doing proper requirement analysis is essential. At the moment, SharePoint provides a server/call-based licensing model for on-premise implementation, so the number of users is important. The cloud option can be considered if the number of users is below 100. There is a need for database server licenses, too. (We use Microsoft SQL Server.) In my opinion, there is no need for Software Assurance.

Our customers handle the licensing costs. The pricing varies from customer to customer. Some, for example, might have Enterprise Agreements, or EAs, and that pricing is different.

Of course the price could be lower. The competition has a much more expensive product, but in terms of the features that are available, they also offer more. In my opinion, the price of SharePoint is fine because it's relative to what the competition has and in terms of the features the competition is offering. Here in Africa, cost is a big factor in making decisions. I would say almost 70% of organizations will look at cost first, and then probably 25% will look at the features the product offers. The cost is really a big factor. Then there's the question of whether it's open sourced.