Do you think that MATLAB is expensive?

I am of mixed opinion on this.

If you have professional work to do, you use professional-quality tools, and it is normal to expect them to be higher priced, as they generally pay for themselves in generality or durability or in being designed for what you as a specialist need. Those traits cost money to make and people are willing to pay appropriately.

From that perspective, perhaps some particular toolboxes might not be worth the value, but overall I do not think MATLAB is unreasonably priced.

However, there are people in the MATLAB community who donate a lot of time and effort to helping others, and those people often get little or no pay for those efforts. To those people (especially the retirees), there is little realistic hope of earning back the cost of toolboxes or of keeping MATLAB reasonably up to date: to those people, MATLAB is expensive.

I do not have a solution to offer to this difficulty at this time.

MATLAB is not cheap. If you need 4 toolboxes and a commercial license, you have to pay some thousands dollars. Using Matlab for scientific purposes costs about the half. (For my argument a factor of 2 or 4 does not matter...)

In a real business case, a customer can invest X dollars to solve a specific problem. If X is smaller than the costs of MATLAB, MATLAB is expensive.

If X is about 10 times the costs of MATLAB, MATLAB is getting very cheap, because its very powerful and well tested toolboxes allows a rapid prototyping, implementation and testing of the program.

So cheap or expensive is a simple balance between the total costs for development and the utility value of the program measured in dollars. If I compare MATLAB with a low level langauge as C, it is cheap, even when a free C-compiler is used: The previous question I've answered here concerned POLYFIT. I suggested to create the Vandermonde matrix manually and calculate R\(Q*y) directly - imagine the effort, if I want to explain this based on C99 and BLAS/LAPACK, including checks of inputs and an automatic usage for DOUBLEs and FLOATs...

A comparison with SciLab, Octave and SciPy is more reasonable. The student version of MATLAB (about 100 Euro) is expensive, because I do not see anything a student can learn with MATLAB, which cannot be learned with Octave. In opposite to this, 5000 Euro for a scientific license for MATLAB and some toolboxes is cheap for the development of a large program (>100.000 lines of code) for clinical decision making.

I work at a university, but I have to pay for MATLAB out of my grants. MATLAB is one of two non-free (both as in beer and speech) pieces of software I use. The other is a sip/voip phone which I just haven't gotten around to replacing with a FOSS alternative. I do not think SciLab and Octave are viable alternatives to MATLAB for me. I think Python is a viable alternative for me. There is not much that I can do in MATLAB that I cannot do in Python. There is no question that if I was just starting out I would use Python instead of MATLAB. MATLAB, however, is cheap for me compared to the cost of porting my existing code to Python.

I really wish Mathworks would separate the MATLAB IDE from the MATLAB language and then make the MATLAB language free, as in speech, while keeping the IDE proprietary. I would be more likely to continue to pay software maintenance and software support in this case and not switch to Python.

I think is too expensive. I am a student and I bought the student version and I was expecting to get everything I need after paying for it then I realized I have only few toolboxes and when I need other toolbox have to go all the way to my uni to get it. Even in my university each department have only selected toolboxes and dont have the others that they expect students wouldn't need it. Like Computer Science they don't have the communication toolbox while Electrical department have it, and Electrical department dont have Image processing while Computer Science have it.. I think its even too expensive that universities can't afford to buy the whole package !!!

I think the US$90 that I paid for the student edition was a steal, though I never used it. Within three months I became a research assistant and given the University site license that comes with most of the toolboxes. It's excellent. I believe there was discussion of canceling the site license due to budgetary issues (But hey, We can blow a few million dollars annually on our losing football team !!</rant>). Now that I'm pretty much through with the University and looking for a real job, I don't know if I'll bother to purchase the professional version or not. I think it would probably be worthwhile to my future employer to have me on it since automation is so easy, but who knows.

The two levers for price are: Demand and Offers. I guess we all agree on a demand for professional computing/programming solutions like MatLab. So what other offers do we see? There are many FEM tools doing what some ToolBoxes do. There is R, MathCad, Mathematica, Maple (basically the symbolic toolbox) etc. But all of them have a different approach and their short commings and advantadges when compared to MatLab. Finally, you might also compare it to Visual Studio and other programming suites. If you take into account, how long dynamic memory appraoch and accordingly programmed matri-vector operations will take you, e.g. in C, and in MatLab it is just writing the math you might conclude: The price is fair.

The academic version of Matlab at about €500 is too expensive for me, a retired lecturer. Cleve Moler in his SIAM oral history interview said that Mathworks makes most of its money from industrial clients who pay the full price, so I don't think they are too concerned about indigent academics.

I believe R is a very good free alternative to Matlab, especially now that the R 2.14.xx 64-bit version gives the correct answer to sin(1e22)[= -0.8522008497671888], among other things. The 32-bit version does not give the correct answer. It has a Matlab mode (e.g., x = y instead of x <- y, etc.), and has many packages (= toolboxes) that may be loaded on-the-fly. It is slower than Matlab because it does not use the Intel or AMD Math kernels. I'm not sure if it has a JIT compiler. However it is being constantly improved.

R has become so popular that even economists and doctors are using it. Imagine! Also, R has a huge user community which is growing daily, so that help is always available, especially on StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8864315/why-is-r-slow-on-this-random-permutation-function

Revolution Analytics has a very professional version of R that has an excellent GUI and it uses the Intel math kernel(s). Academics can get the full version free.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/revolution-r.php

Because I switched from university to corporate pricing, Matlab seems expensive, especially if you rack up several toolboxes, but it is indispensible. The file exchange and Answers help soothe the burn, however. Other software packages are similarly costly so I don't single out Matlab.