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Some of my fellow CodeBetter bloggers (Brendan and Jeff) have taken up the old “Team System is too expensive” chant again. Here is my reply.

The reason the price doesn't make sense to you is because you're not the target market. The target market for Team System is large development groups that are currently using products like ClearCase. Is anyone that is complaining about Team System pricing using ClearCase? I highly doubt it, and if you are using ClearCase, you’re probably excited to pay tens of thousands of dollars less for roughly equivalent functionality.

I was around for the initial install of ClearCase at my previous employer. For ClearCase, which is a configuration management suite and much of which will be available in Team System, the list price is $4,125 for a floating license. You’d need somewhere between 3 to 6 floating licenses per developer. That’s JUST CLEARCASE.

Like Eric Sink said in his excellent comments on the pricing of Team System, MSDN Universal does not mean that you get everything Microsoft sells. That’s just plain wrong. It’s true that is a change, that Microsoft hasn’t managed it very well, and that in general people don’t like change.

Microsoft did relent somewhat and allow current MSDN Universal subscribers to get 1 of the 3 role editions and 5 CALs to the Foundation Server at no additional cost. So for small development shops the incremental cost of getting all 3 editions combined (for 1 person, the other 4 get Premium) AND access to Foundation Server is $1,200.

Let’s put this in perspective. The current list price for MSDN Universal is around $2,800. For access to everything with an upgrade you will pay a total of $4,000.

This works out to an increase of $100 PER MONTH.

Now, if all of the Team Server features are not worth an additional $100 per month to you, then go ahead and be cheap. Use open source software or whatever else. Don’t get me wrong; I love open source software. But if there is something that allows me to bring more value to my clients at an acceptable financial tradeoff, I’m going to do it. If you are a consultant, how does $100 per month compare to your hourly rate?