The solution must improve its licensing models. It bundles all the products into smaller products. We can only have a subset of the functionality available according to our license. I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is high, and ten is low.

The solution is quite expensive. The pricing is too high.

We'd prefer it if the solution was open source. That would make it less expensive.

The solution is expensive for an individual, but for an enterprise/institution (purchasing bulk licenses), it is not a high price for the use that will come from it.

I don't deal with the pricing of the solution. I don't know what it costs the university.

It has an annual licensing policy with an annual renewal of almost 35%. The initial cost (and therefore renewals) are extremely expensive. One can possibly invest that much in hardware and possibly go in for products like R that are very cheap in terms of total cost of ownership.

For clarity, R is an open source tool but with the limitation that it's an in-memory tool. When dealing with large datasets, RAM becomes an issue. R is much more flexible. So, rather that investing in a SAS license, we prefer to invest in high RAM hardware (256/512GB RAM) and use R.

Another issue with R is that native version is a single core product. Even if you have a multi-core CPU, it uses a single core. However, Microsoft R, a free version from Microsoft, does away with that limitation. There is also a multi-core (paid) version of R available through Microsoft which does away with in-memory limitation and works out to be much cheaper than SAS Enterprise Miner.

The license is really expensive. This solution is for large corporations because not everybody can afford it. It is a little bit tricky because you have to buy a license for each and every component that you use. For example, we wanted to add a plugin and we needed to buy it, which makes this an expensive tool.

For me, the pricing is $3000 monthly for the license. There aren't any additional costs.