The BrowserMob Blog

Two of the most common questions we get also happen to be contradictory:

• How can you charge so little?
• How can you charge so much?

To be fair, depending on your perspective these are both very legitimate questions.

The short answers to these questions are:

• We can charge as little as we do because we keep our costs very low. We don’t need 95% profit margins and we’re quite happy building a small-but-efficient business.
• When you factor in the total cost of a load test (man hours, training, scripting, hardware set up), we think we are actually a great deal when compared to even Do-It-Yourself options.

To review our pricing, click here. If you’re interested in learning more, read on.

Understanding Traditional Costs

To understand, allow us to explain the traditional load testing options and their pricing. Usually there are three options people face:

• Use open source software and do it yourself
• Use commercial software and do it yourself
• Use an external load testing service and/or consultants

Each of these options has different pricing implications and associated costs - to you and to the provider.

Generally open source solutions have a low investment cost - often no money for the software and very little for hardware, especially if you can “borrow” it from your IT lab. You’ll then also need to pay for the time your personnel dedicate to setup, scripting, execution, and reporting.

The commercial software, on the other hand, have extremely high up-front fees. For example, you can buy products from Mercury/HP or Borland, but they often can cost $20K or more for even a moderate level of virtual users. They charge based on concurrent users, with 250 users quickly becoming extremely expensive. You’ll also need your own hardware and personnel costs.

Load testing services fall somewhere in the middle. You don’t need your own hardware, but you end up paying for that in the fact that the price per concurrent user per hour is, at a minimum, $3 and often much higher (we’ve seen $6-$10 quoted before). This means a 250 user test for an hour could cost $1500 or more!

Comparing Pricing to Commercial Options

We don’t believe in complex price curves or charging more because you need less right now. Our costs are mostly fixed (with the exception of customer acquisition and support), so we made our prices fixed as well. We do have one lower price point in our subscription plan, which we can afford to do when we know we have a committed customer and don’t have to spend more money finding new ones.

But what about our core infrastructure/load generation costs? Because we use real browsers, they do indeed cost significantly more than any other load testing service. And yet somehow our prices are still cheaper. That’s because we keep our overall operating costs extremely low. We also aren’t trying to become a large business that tries to employ thousands of people, so our margins can be thinner.

Of course we make money on every load test, but we aren’t greedy. By getting a larger quantity of customers we can turn even these tight margins in to a viable business.

Comparing Pricing to Open Source Options

If you compare the cost of a 200 user BrowserMob test for an hour ($200-$400) to the cost of using JMeter, we might look more expensive. And that is why we sometimes get questions about why we’re so expensive compared to Open Source Tool X.

But when you look at the total cost, we often are actually much cheaper. The primary reason is the cost to get started. Using JMeter, OpenSTA, or other open source tools is not easy. They require you to set up hardware and install agents.

Once you have the infrastructure ready, scripting is the next challenge. Because these tools don’t run real browsers (if they did you’d need a LOT more hardware), creating a good script is very difficult. You have to make sure that your cookies, AJAX headers, and HTTP parameters all get handled properly.

On the other hand, recording a BrowserMob script is painless. If you can record a Selenium script in Selenium IDE, you’re done. No need to worry about adjusting it to work in a load test.

If you consider the setup and scripting costs, we think our product ends up being comparable to Do-It-Yourself options. And for the same price, you get to rent a ton more hardware, use real browsers, get simple scripting, great error reporting, and access to expert advice.

That’s why we think BrowserMob is easily the lowest cost choice when compared to any other option: commercial, open source, or external service.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under FAQ. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.