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?
82 Comments
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.
MATLA Perpetual license is so much expensive. Sales executive is not coperative.
I tried to purchase Simulink, but was told I needed to become current on my support service tithing first. So it adds another $2K to the price. No Thanks. Time to go find another tool!
Hobby user here... If you think it is expensive, try out an open-source version... GNU Octave . It's free. It's very similar, albeit not as supported, and you get the source code to compile and use as your heart desires. I was using Octave for a while-- and it's pretty good. However the business case for Matlab got me to finally fork over the $$$ even though it does the same basic functionality. Here's how: I was intent on developing my own home-grown toolbox(es) to do a specific task (neural network functions with specific interfaces to play around with...) It would have taken me a month to do this on my own on Octave given my schedule. The home grown may have been tailor-made and "better" in some respects.. However, for the $150 home license (glad they finally added this option!), and the $50 for the NN toolbox.. (and a few more fifties for some other toolboxes I found helpful) I can't justify NOT spending $200+ to save many weeks work. The guys at Matlab are awesome. They do a great job and the support is fantastic. If you are hell-bent on saving every nickel-- use Octave. If you can rub a couple hundred bucks together for a home license, I'd do that (and I did). --And if I ever had a business case where I required it for business, I'd pay for the full license if it were using it in that capacity. There are lots of options.
...still waiting on you guys to sort out the issues with the IP stack on Win10 machines (a growing issue with security concerns) so I don't have to use a pcap stack to do network i/o at the packet level.
Not that this is a major complaint, I assume that the Communications Toolbox will work with the pcap stack if I try to use it that way instead of writing an interface between it and Matlab. Or SSH if necessary so I don't have to write something like scp.
In a place I used to work, I had a co-worker who was an ardent FOSS person. They apparently believed it was better to devote a team of three PhDs and two programmers for two years to create an open source version of something rather than spend $50 per year on a software license. It boggled my mind.
That's very expensive when it is not your main engineering tool but convenient environment for post- and pre- processing and "quick and dirty" proof-of-concept models. I might get away with the basic licence only (which has a fairly affordable price of £375) but I need to make sure that modules covered by basic licence contain all thh functionality I need
Anastasia Makarevich:
The purchase of the Home license includes one year of Software Support Service, which permits you to open support cases and to download and use any new versions of MATLAB that come out during the term you are covered. You will be permitted to renew the support service, at a price. The license is "perpetual", meaning that it will not expire and that you will be able to continue to use the version you paid for, but you will not be entitled to new versions after your support service expires unless you renew the support service.
You should contact Mathworks directly with these questions. People here are mostly users and whilst they can give advice, this is a subject that you should want answers directly from Mathworks on. Someone here may give you well meaning advice that turns out to be incorrect.
I still don't understand the payment scheme. I've just bought a student license. Recently I received a letter from MathWorks that I would be able to download newer versions during the next year and the they will remind me when it's time to renew the license. I was sure I wasn't buying a subscription. Will they take my Matlab from next year if I can't pay (it's hard to predict the future)?
As far as I am aware Matlab Home has access to all functions in the base Matlab and if you add on toolboxes you will get access to those too with a couple of exceptions I think (e.g. I don't think Matlab Coder is available with a home license).
As a "retired" person I am happy that mathwork finally decided to have an Home edition. But it is sad that the Home edition does not offer the possibility to upgrade! Spending the money for the Home Edition and adding Toolboxes as the financial ability makes it possible is an effort well worth and justifiable at the reduced cost within the family budget. But the development related to technologies related to the design and modeling process linked to external proprietary hardware is taking place at a very fast speed makes the fact of not being able to update the tools painful.
Thanks! This looks like something I could recommend to readers of my book. I went to the Matlab Home site but it does not tell me what built-in functions are available. Where can I go to find out before I recommend it?
Thanks,
Dave
@David, there is the MATLAB Home Edition available for non-commercial use:
I first bought Matlab in 1989. It was on one 5 1/4 inch floppy disc. I was astounded at what I could now do. As time went on I kept updating Matlab until 2001 when I retired. A few years later I became a Matlab author and now keep reasonably up to date for free (I am now a two-time Matlab author).
I am frustrated that individuals who might buy my books can not afford to use Matlab. I have tried Octave and, although it can do elementary things, it stumbles badly when trying to deal with multi-second wav files and 3D graphics (which I want readers to use). A basic 64-bit version that contained the tools in the 1989 Matlab would be wonderful if it was priced reasonably, say, on the order of $100. Then I could recommend it to individuals not working for a large technical company.
Unfortunately, I do not think Mathworks could gainfully sell a small package like this and make money.
We also use MATLAB in my old company. We use it along with other expensive programs like CATIA and ANSYS. But we were able to cut back on the license cost by using software asset management tools. My former colleague uses OpenIT ( www.openit.com )for monitoring license usage.He's an IT guy there, he's mainly using it for reporting and facilitating IT chargeback. They say the software also has license harvesting feature. I'm not sure if they have a free program, but i think they have free demo. Anyways the good thing about it is that, it works even without the license manager. Haven’t tried it yet, but i maybe evaluating the Open iT software soon. Will let you know if it works for me.
Whichever way you look at it, MATLAB is expensive. But that's not to say it isn't good value. The value of MATLAB of course depends entirely on its use/user, and many users including myself would argue that MATLAB does offer very good value. As a total package, it is the best software available.
MATLAB is not the only expensive software out there, look at AUTODESK or ANSYS for example. Unlike AUTOCAD which has MICROSTATION, MATLAB is essentially free from direct competition. MATLAB's main competitors in the control sectors are National Instruments and Esterel Technologies, the latter of which just got bought out by ANSYS. Of these, in my oppinion MATLAB offers the best and most complete product and should therefore demand the highest price.
But I do wish there were more flexible licensing options available. For example, sometimes you may only require MATLAB for a short duration, for a fixed specified project.
I feel for those who want to buy additional toolboxes for old versions. This should be allowed, because some people may want to standardise on a specific release. Especially if clients or colleagues are working from the same version.
I also think it should be easier to patch MATLAB. For example, you can go to the bug reports page and download patches for many fixed issues, but this is an entirely manual, time consuming and sometimes complex process. IMHO there should be an automatic software update mechanism.
Lastly, I agree that there are too many toolboxes that are too much alike. I think Mathworks should continue to merge very simuliar toolboxes to simplify the product portfolio. Take the Signal Processing Toolbox and DSP System Toolbox for example... Or the MATLAB and Simulink Report Generators... Personally I don't think that's justified and only serves to complicate their portfolio.
I am glad that MATLAB is a commercial product, developers need to get paid and for those that rely on quality, there is simply no comparison to the free 'alternatives'. Just my 2 cents...
Paul
I also think it should be easier to patch MATLAB. For example, you can go to the bug reports page and download patches for many fixed issues, but this is an entirely manual, time consuming and sometimes complex process. IMHO there should be an automatic software update mechanism.
FYI, since this answer was posted MathWorks has begun offering Update releases that include fixes for a collection of bugs reported against each release. As an example, as of the time I write this there have been 7 Update releases for general release R2020b that have included hundreds of bugs fixes.
"Whichever way you look at it, MATLAB is expensive."
...well, there's absolutely expensive, and there's relatively expensive.
I think that's enough said in response to your comment.
Personnally no, I think its fairly priced. Mathworks developers need to be paid after all, and a reduction in fees will have an impact on the quality of the product - its not a listed company and there are no shareholders to pay dividends to. In 2010 The Mathworks Ltd had Sales of £22.69m and after costs had a Net Income of £290k only.
One of the advantages of matlab is its easy interfacing ability, so rather than say buy the datafeed toolbox, you can write your own Bloomberg API C# code and use it via matlab dotNet Interface, same with database toolbox - its pretty easy and quick in C#. Only buy a toolbox if really necessary!
R is extremely unreliable as the code coming from the user community is very prone to errors (without being rigourously checked for bugs) and not reliably supported (you may get a reply from author in 1day or quite possibly never), its a black box. And if you have to take the time to run through it yourself to check everything, then you may as well be writting it yourself. C++ of course is faster in execution but takes many many more man-hours to develop anything - this time is curcial for us.
These days people seem to more and more expect everything to be for free, I guess music and movie downloads have something to do with it.
@Mark Whirly
Reproducibility seems often to be a bigger issue in financial modelling. I've been in "Meetups" where none of the participants were too bothered about the precision, but were concerned to reproduce their results exactly in the event of a law suit. The same rule applies in other fields and is the reason MATLAB Version 2.01 can still be found running of a steam-powered 80286 PC in the corner of some offices.
For my own work, IEEE double precision is typically more than adequate, but it can be too easy to dismiss innacuracies as due to rounding errors when, in fact, there is a bug that should be addressed.
Hi Malcolm For my own application, I'm not too concerned with machine/truncation error (since financial modelling involves estimation, overfitting and misspecification aspects which far far outweigh this in my view). I agree Matlab does make an accuracy/speed tradeoff but some kind of tradeoff is an inevitability in all languages I think (bugfreeness & usability being the other dimensions of this tradeoff). The difference between Matlab and open R scripts is that I have the confidence of knowing that code has been checked multiple times by a team, and that they have full accountability for this - so I'm confident it has the best chance of being bug-free (and finding a tradeoff that adheres to a uniform approach rather than R which is big unknown). I recently attended a presentation by Jos Martin in mathworks where he describes their philosophy to development (maybe you'll find it interesting?).
@Jan
Thanks for this. Your FEX submission illustrates the advantage of open-source. Code available, documented and referenced. Therefore open to discussion/suggestion. Here's one suggestion: as commented in your code, there is a typo in the 2004 Ogita paper. It might be helpful flagging that on the FEX description - it would have saved me some head scratching.
PS A handy test of various algorithms is discussed at http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/fp_errors.html
Kahan's error compensation method is very nice. But the method to accumulate ina 128bit double described by Knuth is faster and remarkably more accurate, see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/26800-xsum.
"...if you have to take the time to run through it yourself..."
That is true for MATLAB too. It sometimes trades accuracy for speed, and when/how are not always documented. It also relies on third party products: "We rely on code generated by various C compilers and settings in various libraries, especially Intel's Math Kernel Library (MKL), that we do not control."( <http://www.mathworks.co.uk/support/solutions/en/data/1-79FEJH/index.html?solution=1-79FEJH>)
Take a simple sum:
>> x=rand(1,1000);
>> sum(x)==sum(fliplr(x))
ans =
0
So Kahan compensation is not being used. Is any?
In Octave you can select the 'extra' option. The docs tell us "For double precision inputs, 'extra' indicates that a more accurate algorithm than straightforward summation is to be used". It might of course be even more helpful if they also told us which.
While the argument of the netto income is reasonable, it is not exhaustive: TMW would sell more licenses, if Matlab is cheaper. A lot of users can aford a single release only, and because bugs are usually fixed by upgrading only, they obtain a limited stability only. So you get 2 scenarios:
- Matlab + 1 year service = 1000$ (fictive, absolute value does not matter here). With a budget of 2000$ for 2 years, a lab buys two licenses for 1 year, and lives with the old release including its bugs for the 2nd year.
- Matlab + 1 year service = 500$, lab has the same budget (of course): 2 licenses for 2 years are bought, TMW earns the same money, but the lab has a newer and more stable system in the 2nd year. And the free-lancer XY can afford such a license also => 500$ plus for TMW.
Therefore I do agree only (but at least) partially, that the netto income is a valid argument for the costs of the product.
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