VSTS Licensing
Yesterday we announced pricing and licensing terms for VSTS. Well, more precisely we tried to but few could actually find the information they needed to start formulating a plan for purchasing and budgeting cycles. I apologize for this. I should have reviewed the MSDN site more closely before it went live. I think a lot of people rightly had a bad experience because it wasn’t easy to find the info they were looking for. We are actively working on updating the site navigation and information. In the mean time, to make this easier to understand, I’ve included information below which explains what price someone who is buying retail, and the same for someone buying under the Open License plan (5 licenses of a qualifying product, see http://www.microsoft.com/licensing for more info on volume licensing) would pay for each of the SKUs. Remember that this is not including any promotions nor any discounts you may receive from your account management team. It is in essence the “most” you would pay for the products on the Open License plan. Also remember that there are more volume license plans available and if you are purchasing in greater volumes, the price comes down substantially.
There’s also been some issues raised about not getting the server in the “suite” box and the assumption that the price would be “huge”. While it’s true the server isn’t in the suite (you don’t get license to deploy any server w/ MSDN today, only for dev/test/evaluation use), the cost thing simple isn’t the case. If you look below, you’ll see that if you buy a single server, you pay $2,799 for the server license. Remember that server scales from 1 to about 1K users running on it. A comparable “server” solution from the competition is 10 to 20 (or more) times that cost. No, you can’t compare this to VSS because it’s much more than source code control and it’s much more robust and scalable. But if you did compare it, you’d see that as soon as you buy more than 5 SourceSafe licenses, the server, even with all of its new functionality, is cheaper. That means that for teams between 5 and 1K people, the server is cheaper than buying SourceSafe licenses! Some of you out there are going to say “ah, but we don’t pay SourceSafe licenses because we get them in MSDN”. To that I’d say then that we’re expecting you to pay < $3,000 for your entire dev team (in total, not per person) to have enterprise source code control. Check the competition, do the research and then come back and buy it because you can’t touch the price for a supported integrated, enterprise ready product.
-Rick
| Product | Estimated Retail Pricing | Open License (NL) |
| Availability | Standalone | With MSDN Premium Subscription (1 Year) | With MSDN Premium Subscription (Renewal – 1 Year) | Standalone | With MSDN Premium Subscription (per year, 2 yr. term) |
| Team Suite | N/A | $10,939 | $4,598 | $8,079 | $6,382 |
| Team Edition for Software Architects | $5,469 | $2,299 | $4,040 | $3,191 |
| Team Edition for Software Developers | $5,469 | $2,299 | $4,040 | $3,191 |
| Team Edition for Software Testers | $5,469 | $2,299 | $4,040 | $3,191 |
| Team Foundation Server | $2,799 | N/A | $2,230 | N/A |
| Team Test Load Agent | $5,089 | $4,040 |
