I’m looking into the pricing for SAP Cloud Platform services and, well to be honest, not particularly liking what I see.

Recently I’ve been pleasantly encouraged by new services such as Workflow and Business Rules becoming available on the (free) trial cloud platform, which is great. I get to learn about the features and try things out. Encouraged by what I find, even in these services’ early days, I decide to inform myself of how much an organisation would have to pay for these services.

So I follow the links and end up in the SAP Cloud Platform Pricing & Packaging area, which is a little bit too high level for what I’m looking for. Fortunately, I think, there’s a link to a (PDF) pricing document (the URL for this particular resource suggests a date of May 2017).

Let’s say I’m interested in putting together a small project using the Workflow service and also the Business Rules service, for a small department – about 25 users. I’m going to leave out any thoughts of storage and DB processing for now, and focus on the business services, but will want to deploy some integration scenarios to interface with my existing systems.

Here are my observations when trying to figure out what it will cost.

The main pricing page is not much use, because it doesn’t tell me whether the Workflow service and the Business Rules service are included in any of the packages. I do note, however, that the “for medium business” package versions are perhaps what I’m looking for, as they’re “perfect for midsized businesses or departments”. While looking at the costs for these medium business packages, I see that the “multiple application edition” is “now” €59 / user / month, not much more than the “single application edition” at €39 / user / month. Has there been a price drop? Let’s see.

I start reading the pricing document PDF and see that instead of €59 / user / month, the “multiple application edition” is twice the price, at €118 / user / month. I guess (that’s all I can do) that the “now” on the website does denote a price drop. Good. A 100% jump to go from one application to two is a little steep.

So what about the specifics? The high level info is OK, but I need detail. I jump to the “Table 1” which gives me some more info. The “Enterprise Package” (sic) pricing looks much more than I’d like to consider shelling out for my department (starting at €1,500/month, through to €15,000/month), so I stay with the “Medium Business Packages” and see that there’s a minimum number of users (10). That’s OK, I have 25.