I expect the answer to be some obscure B2B CAD program? Or perhaps an RDMS?
I realise it can be hard to compare due to difference in pricing models - pay per seat, pay per month, pay one off - but I think we can still have a good discussion.
Of course, that's nowhere near as expensive as lots of other enterprise software, but it was as "off-the-shelf" as you could get short of your local Fry's or Best Buy. No "call us for details" pricing, per-core licensing, recurring subscriptions and support contracts... just old-fashioned software sold directly as a product.
Unfortunately, I can't find screenshots now, so I'm just going off my hazy memories and the details might be a bit off :P
- The Sims 4
Total cost is around 1200$ (with ALL DLCs, packs, etc.)
In effect, they wanted £48K for nothing.
Yes, Lucee was in our future, but I left before that came to be.
About 3yr after leaving that company, Adobe tracked me down via LinkedIn and my personal Web site and messaged me using my personal email address to put them back in touch directly with someone at my old job who could pick up licence negotiations.
I told them to phone Head Office - they said they'd done that but had not received a return call. I very politely told them to fu....go away as it was not my problem.
Not sure about today, but there were licenses for highly specialized stuff for ONE seat @ $150k/year. Most were $30k/year.
$29,400, floating license (Annual).
Engineering 3D Cad modelling/design tool. I learned it when it was called Pro Engineer at University.
https://www.autodesk.com/products
UE5 has a seat-based subscription model in the same ballpark:
Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?
This is unlike most other enterprise software. A lot of it has really expensive per user licenses, but if you’re only buying the full Adobe licenses for a couple of employees then it’s not really that expensive, at least not on the over all IT budget.
The systems that I have personally worked with have all been in the $5M+ range. But that is just for the software licenses. There also are an army of very well paid consultants tasked with customising the system to the clients requirements. And then there is the enterprise hardware from IBM, HP or Sun (now Oracle).
Another that comes to mind was when I was forced to buy “Mindmanager” and was shocked at the cost. Even the base licence was something like €1600/u/year; but the extensions are required, and paid.
Theres a bunch of “top” items of things, gitlab ultimate and sourcegraph being €99/u/m come to mind, which are off the shelf, and actually useful even for frugal people like myself.
Over time DaVinci Resolve went from a hardware-software system costing $X00,000 to having a software-only version for $1500 in today's dollars to having two tiers, a free version and $295 "studio" version that is also bundled in with BlackMagic hardware and cameras.
($800,000 to Zero - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvP5_HFQSk)
I suppose a half-million-dollar hybrid system might not be off the shelf. For things individual users could actually (edit: realistically) buy, the perpetual Adobe Collection license was $3k in today-money.
For Mac users, Final Cut Pro Studio 1 was $1299 and Logic Studio used to be $999, plus paid major version upgrades; probably multiply by 1.5x for inflation; now they're $299 and $199, or IIRC $299 together in a bundle for students, and they've each received free updates for a decade.
One not mentioned that comes to mind is E-tap, used by electrical engineers. Well into the five figure territory once all the various bells and whistles were added.
However the most expensive software I ever saw in the wild was some little known simulation platform for a mathematician running predictive models (it also did this with 3D graphics, so both senses of the term) on mine/rail/port operational scenarios. That was into low six figures a seat and five in annual maintenance.
It's not clear, but for what I recall, it wasn't even permanent licenses.
[1] https://www.petex.com/pe-geology/move-suite/
[2] https://phitem.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/presentation/actus-ufr...
There's also Photoshop, Resolume, and TouchDesigner, which are expensive, but nowhere near "the most".
You purchased preset 'lots' of about a square mile containing accurate terrain data to run the simulations, and if you were interested in an area that saddled two patches, you had to buy both (iirc you couldn't just specify arbitrary coordinates).
I had to spend some time figuring out how few patches we needed to make it 'worth it', but I don't remember the final figure; it must have been in the 5 digits all said and done?
wysiwyg doesn't have quite the same bells and whistles but is $2k+ a year for just lighting previz https://cast-soft.com/wysiwyg-lighting-design/#compare
Enterprise software can easily get into 10s of millions per year for licensing plus implementation and consulting fees.
Or if you’re talking pure licensing on a per user basis, easily $10k-$50k per user annually.
You used to be able to pick up a series of 4 or 5 technical manuals from the manufacturer of your car for 100-200 bucks.
Now, with everything the cloud, they want subscription fees.
$1400 a year for Toyota Information Systems. $1600 a year for Stellantis wiTech. $2200 a year for Volvo TechInfo.
All for access to a database of PDFs.
Turned out to be the CEO so we have to keep paying for it.
Back around 2009ish the company I was at sold a single enterprise license for our software for $10M. Average deal size then was probably in the $500k-$2M range.
Got rid of it, hired 2 people with a small portion of the budget that was freed up and never looked back.
The serial dongle that they used - possibly hasp iirc - hadn't been implemented correctly, so ultimately where was a CMP EAX,1 / JNZ that was easy to NOP.
Seems like approximately 10k per suite, per seat, but I think there is some room for negotiation.
Out of the box arguably still better than today’s web stacks.
Palantir is a recent hight water mark I've seen as well.
For example, Palantir