Visual Studio Online Gets Cheaper...

Brian Harry’s blog - More pricing and licensing changes coming

Earlier this year, we started a process of reviewing our pricing and licensing for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online.  Our intent was to review all of the customer feedback we’ve received to look for changes that would simplify purchasing and make it more affordable for teams to include everyone in the broader organization who needs to interact with the development team.

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Let’s look at the changes:

Release Management

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So, we are changing it.  As of January 1^st, 2015, you will no longer have to pay any per-processor (or any other per deployment environment) charge for Release Management.  ...

Test Execution

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In response, we’re making two licensing changes that I believe will help with this greatly: ...

Cloud Load Testing

It didn’t take long after we released our cloud load test pricing for me to realize that we had gotten it wrong.  We originally priced it by...

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So, we decided we needed a tiered model that would give good price breaks as load test usage got higher.

Our new pricing model for VS Online Cloud Load Testing is as follows: ...

So, in the scenario above, the customer would pay 20,000 * $0.00 + 1,980,000 * $0.0004 + 8,000,000 * $0.0002 + 71,000,000 * $0.0001 = $9,492 per month.  That’s $162,000/$9,492 = 17 times smaller.  ...

VS Online Build Service

We’ve gotten feedback on our build service pricing that it has a similar “scaling” problem as our load test pricing, though not nearly as big.  To make the build service more affordable for teams running many builds, we are introducing a tiered pricing model there as well.

The VS Online build service pricing will be: ...

Visual Studio Online Professional

One of the offerings for Visual Studio Online is Visual Studio Online Professional which combines a VS Online basic license with a monthly license to Visual Studio Professional.  Since its inception, we’ve had a 10 user limit on this product because it’s really designed for small teams (whereas MSDN subscriptions are the solution for larger teams).  However, after we got enough people asking for the 11th user, we realized that the complexity just wasn’t worth it and that 10 seemed pretty arbitrary.  As a result, we are eliminating the 10 user limit – though...

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We are not done looking at pricing and licensing, of course.  We are continuing to look at feedback and look for opportunities to remove friction and simplify.  We always want to hear what you think and will do our best to make you happy.

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When this was announced at MVP Summit and it was greeted with applause (and getting applause from the VS ALM MVP's is not an easy thing)...