I use the free trial of these tools like Mable, Applitools, and Parasoft. However, there was no free trial of Eggplant, but I was able to use Mable and Applitools more thoroughly because they gave me a free trial.

Eggplant is expensive. What makes it cheap for us is that in the company where I work, the more people that use it, the cheaper the licenses get. So it's kind of a deal in a way, the more you buy, the cheaper they are.

To put it in perspective, if we think about it, their support is actually wrapped into the cost. So you can call and talk to them any time of day and they aren't going to send you a bill for it. Whereas, Katalon or QF-test, or SmartBear, like TestComplete, will send you a bill. They'll send you a bill at the end of the week. You call them up for a support issue, they'll bill you. But their install and product are pretty cheap. Katalon, TestComplete and QF-test are cheap tools, but their support doesn't come cheap, they'll stick you on it.

Let's just put it into perspective. We had a team that didn't go through our company to get the licenses. They went through Eggplant to purchase the license and they purchased Manager as well. Functional for one year is $16,000. I don't know what that is in Quid or Pounds, but it's a lot. So now they added Manager and all that, and I think for one or two licenses with DIA and Manager, it ended up being $45,000 for two licenses, for a year.

In terms of deployment of the solution, we have an internal server in a private cloud running the licensing machine and we have three dev licenses for the product as well as two run-time licenses.

The development license allows you to run Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence and allows you to test it and run your script. The runtime license is what is used when you set up a schedule. All it needs is a run-time license to run the executables and run the tests. But since you don't need the full Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence Functional IDE, you just need the run-time license.

Eggplant Test is a very expensive solution. It's not suitable for small companies. Instead, it is more suited for big customers.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is based on user licenses. Other similar tools use different types of licensing models. 

This solution is expensive when compared to the market. However, the reason it is more expensive is because of its stability, high performance, and for its support of any technology.

There are no additional costs other than the licensing.

Depending on your use cases, it's prudent to look around at some other solutions if you feel there are others that offer similar features. If you choose Eggplant, you should evaluate how you're going to use it and make a smart decision about the number of developer- and execution-only licenses you purchase to maximize your budget. We found that going heavier on execution-only licenses has been a way to reduce our costs and maximize our ability to benefit from the software.

Beyond the standard licensing fees there is just the cost of the resources it takes to do the work of utilizing Eggplant. And that is much better than the alternative of manual testing. There are almost negligible hardware costs. We have Eggplant running on commodity workstations that aren't anything special or expensive. I wouldn't consider it a significant expense to host it.

End-to-end testing isn't possible for us because of the licensing problems. It's very expensive, so we only have two development/execution licenses.

I think the licencing model needs to be looked at as it is very expensive, other companies are using/looking at multiple models to assist with various sized companies.

It probably has a yearly license.