Licensing and Pricing

Licensing Model

The licensing model, and thus the pricing, for AnthillPro3 is different from the licensing and pricing model for AnthillPro 2.x. Based on an exhaustive amount of dialog with our customer base, current and prospective, we have developed a more equitable approach to pricing accounts of varying sizes.

Scalable Pricing

The major goal for the pricing model for AnthillPro 3 was to have something that would scale from the little guy to the big guy and would provide a price that is proportional to the value delivered. The only way to accomplish this goal was to come up with one or more scaling variables that are used to calculate the price. Thus our search for scaling variables began. We looked at the number of servers or the number of Agents as the scaling variables. At first glance it appeared that the number of Agents would be a good scaling variable. But upon closer inspection it turns out that because of support for network deployments, a large company with hundreds of project and hundreds of servers may not need any more Agents than a 5-person shop working on two projects with a handful of servers. We then looked at the number of administrators defined within AnthillPro 3 as the scaling variable. But here again we know of enterprises with one or two build masters supporting hundreds of projects and even the smallest team will still need at least one admin account. So this turned out to be a sub optimal scaling variable. The number of projects configured in Anthill is also not a very good scaling variable because it encourages poor development practices in the form of monolithic projects. We strongly believe in modular or component development and encourage users to have many individual projects with dependencies between them. It would not be fair for us to encourage a practice where the better you are at it, the more we charge you. What we eventually found is that the only appropriate scaling variable that would accurately scale from the little guy to the big guy and would be proportional to the value delivered is the number of developers.

Pricing for AnthillPro 3

For the above outlined reasons, pricing for AnthillPro 3 is based on the number of developers. There are no per-server fees, no per-project fees, and no per-agent fees. How do we determine who is a developer? If the user is committing code to a project, that user is a developer. What about team turnover (you use mostly contractors that come and go every couple of months)? No problem. We use a sliding window to calculate the number of developers. So if a user has stopped committing code, that user will not be included in the developer count any more. What if a developer is committing code to two projects, will that developer be counted twice? No, each developer is counted only once. If a developer is committing code to multiple projects our license system will notice that and count the developer only once.

Please contact our sales department for a quote tailored for your specific configuration, including your specifid SCM (ClearCase, Perforce, PVCS or Dimensions, MKS, StarTeam, etc.).

Site-wide and Enterprise Level Licensing

We do support site-wide and Enterprise level pricing and licensing. Please contact our sales department if you're interested in these option.

Open Source Projects

We use many Open Source projects and tools on a daily basis and are eager to give back to the community. We offer free licenses of AnthillPro3 to legitimate Open Source projects. Please contact our sales department to take advantage of this offer.