Do you think that MATLAB is expensive?
Paulo Silva
on 14 Aug 2011
Latest activity Reply by Christopher Hartline
on 12 Aug 2022
We all know that MATLAB is probably the best software for engineering purposes, I think it's a little expensive unless you have it for free on your school or place you work, please share your opinion about MATLAB cost, including toolboxes, student versions... is it that expensive?
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The only way that Student and Home licenses will not be used to earn income would be to cripple them to the point that they could not be used to earn income, at which point they would be nearly worthless.
The fact that Mathworks has continued to make money from Matlab for many decades speaks to the value of its current business-model as well as its management over time. That doesn't mean that the Matlab market operates the way that Mathworks wants it to. But it is working.
The only question is whether or not that will continue in the face of the OS movement.
And tht is a question for every company that develops software with restrictive license terms, even for OS re the GPL.
So here's the thing. Bugatti develops, makes and sells vehicles which are based on high prices and a market of owners who are happy to buy their products. Bugatti is the "boutique" label for Volkswagen. It's not like there is not a market for "expensive" software products. Even Microsoft knows the wisdom of giving-away products at the low end to generate revenue at the high end. The question is where does Matlab sit in the Mathworks software lineup and why even entertain the interests of users (who may or may not be legitimate) to make Matlab more compatible with OS tools. That's like the directors at Bugatti saying "hm, maybe we should sell a $5k version of the Chiron, or at the very least find some maker of cheap aftermarket parts for expensive cars and collaborate with them". This is why I love the current Matlab model of toolkits and add-ons for an additional price. Customers pay to leverage their investment in the basic Matlab product, those toolkits have a real-world market value that should fluctuate together with their price. Those toolkits are worthless, supposedly, without Matlab. That's exactly how it should be, in my opinion. I don't see the wisdom in trying to control or even influence the Matlab market through the licensing of product versions that are technically the same, that's like asking the market to violate those licenses. But by the same token so is adding value to the product that is commensurate with the price. This is a problem with the entire software market: it is crucial for developers to be able to control who runs their software but by the same token they need information to decide who should be able to run their software. That information might be as valuable as the software itself. Of course a market will develop to disable that control, but that's par for the course. At some level it's also a battle between Matlabs license security and integrity and hackers who want to free Matlab code to be run at will.
Using a Student license to earn income is absolutely against the MATLAB license terms. Same for a Home license or MOOC license.
Formally speaking, it is against the license terms for Academic licenses as well. I am not sure if there are exemptions for cases where internal university regulations require each group to act as a "cost center" that charges other groups for services. If it would normally be entirely within the license terms to write some software for internal use, but internal regulations require that the group writing the software bill the receivers, then I do not know how Mathworks would handle that.
Doesn't matter
You either need it or you don't need it
If you don't need it, then why are you worried about how much it costs
If you do need it, then you can factor the price of a license into the charge to customer
So your only problem is if you do need it but you can't spread the cost out among your clients.
And if that is the case then take a class at a local college that offers free Matlab to its students (Matlab will give you a student license if you proved them with a student email) & do your work there.
Or learn to accomplish your tasks without Matlab.
If you are not earning money from your use of MATLAB then you may be eligible for the MATLAB Home license. https://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab-home.html
It would be nice if Matlab had a low-income as well as a student price. I'm 72 on a low income (EBT card) but don't think my brain has decayed yet and want to do some work in Graphs and AI. But the regular price is way too high for me. Matlab should let you provide proof of income, such as an EBT card number, for the student price. A lot of us are self-learners.
Expensive but very good software support.
Yes, it is expensive. But the quality of support you will get from this software will justify the cost.
MATLAB is probably expensive for a small company. For a large company, I think it is relatively inexpensive. If I ever need to contact MATLAB support to figure out a function call (e.g. once I had to interface with C# before), usually a reply with example code would be in my email the next morning. Compare that to having say Python and Google searching, StackExchange questions, etc. and waiting for a reply. So if you value productivity the benefits are great. I also am a regular Python user and despite liking the language, MATLAB is far easier to get work done in. The syntax is cleaner than other languages for mathematical work. The data structures tend to be easier to work with and make more sense. Compare to Pandas, NumPy - sometimes I play around for 10m trying to figure out proper indexing for a complicated call. In MATLAB usually the help menu has an answer. It's just a good commercial product.
Company size could matter, if you're a startup company you may be eligible for the MATLAB and Simulink for Startups program.
"MATLAB is probably expensive for a small company. For a large company, I think it is relatively inexpensive."
The corporate size doesn't matter at all, what matters is the budget for items like Matlab and the pros & cons of using Matlab for development.
Matlab has been around a long, long time in a market where hundreds of other tech companies have come and gone. My guess is that they know what they are doing. The question is not whether Matlab is "expensive" or not. The question is whether you need to buy it or not. I wouldn't spend $50 on a Matlab license if I didn't need it.
I have used MATLAB and MAPLE. I think MAPLE is cheaper than MATLAB when purchasing more than one license and the base MAPLE include 70% of the toolbox that MATLAB would have required.
Vaishali Scientific Centre:
I deleted your quotation because price quotations are often considered confidential information.
Your quote was for 10 concurrent academic licenses of a series of toolboxes. The pricing you were given appears to be about 40% or more lower than US or Canada academic licenses, I calculate. The pricing you were given appears to be less than 12% of the price I would have to pay for 10 licenses for those toolboxes, as I am not Academic.
Concurrent licenses from Mathworks are the most expensive form of licenses: in your case they would allow any 10 people from your institution to use the software simultaneously. If you are looking for having 10 specific people use the software, then you could ask about Networked Named User licenses, which are less expensive than Concurrent licenses.
Depending on what your people need to do with the software, you might find that although eventually each user might use a particular toolbox, that it might be uncommon that more than (say) 4 users at a time are using one of the toolboxes, where-as a different toolbox might often be in use by (say) 7 of your people and it might turn out all 10 need that toolbox a fraction of the time. In such a case you might consider ordering only (say) 5 or 6 of the one that is not typically going to be used by most people. The Concurrent licenses and the Group (Networked Named User) licenses both keep "pools" of licenses, and will allow people to check out licenses as long as not more than the configured number of people are trying to use that toolbox simultaneously.
The disadvantage of shared licenses like this is that the licenses are considered to be "borrowed" from the time they are first used until the time the MATLAB session ends, so especially if people do not log off when they go home, you can end up chasing people to quit their MATLAB session in order to free up the toolbox license of something they used a while ago but are not actively using now.
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