OutSystems Licensing: 5 things you need to know

The growing shift to high-performance, enterprise-grade, low-code solutions has led Version 1 to partner with OutSystems since 2019. Indeed, Gartner predicts a $26.9bn low code market in 2023 (link). We will address why low code, and why OutSystems within that space, in a different article.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

In this post, we will look at licensing OutSystems solutions — what can customers expect? What’s the range and what does it cover? So, here are 5 things that you should be aware of when considering OutSystems.

1. A license model that scales on support, users and complexity

You can get started with a free personal edition — this is a perpetual use license for an individual, which has full development features but some restrictions on sharing for example. For paid subscriptions, the current model starts from around €15k per year — for that, you’d get enough space to build and host a small application or two, and up to 100 internal users. You can read more about all pricing options here.

The model scales on three aspects:

• Platform Support — there are high availability database options, additional environments for live or test usage, 24x7 support, and detailed logging/intrusion detection options available when needed — but you can start with just the development and live environments, and nightly backups with 8x5 support.
• End users — sold in packs of 100 internal users or 1000 external users (defined by email domain), with internal typically having more activity than external. The pricing per pack reduces with scale. Our current largest user base has 100,000 active external users, and we have looked at models up to 3,000 internal users so far. An unlimited option is also available.
• Complexity — to judge the impact on scalability and hosting costs, and to start small, a complexity measure is in place. Measured in ‘application objects’ (AOs), this number is always visible to you, in all environments. These are sold in packs of 150 (a small-medium application size) — we would typically recommend customers start with 5–6 packs as a good baseline for a first project with some expansion room.

2. Hosting and Storage are included — if you use the OutSystems cloud

OutSystems strongly prefer that they host the solutions on AWS. It’s in a private VPC, and their support is fully accredited for security — see the screenshot below (and link).

However, some customers have strong architecture or security principles that require a self-managed instance.

• For those, Azure and AWS installation wizards are available, and a guide for local manual installation is also kept up to date.
• Those options do require the owner to cover not only hosting, storage, and server license fees (e.g., SQL Server) — but also require ongoing effort to apply patches and updates to the operating system, application and database server tools, as well as the OutSystems platform tools which are regularly updated.
• Hybrid setups are also possible (applications can run in the cloud but access on-premises data for example) but some consideration is needed for the ability to expand on the data model, and the ability to access data through the firewall, which can be through a VPN tunnel, an API-led gateway approach, or some other controlled method of staging. Further consultation is advised if a hybrid approach is considered.

3. No extra fees for developers, but loads of help

OutSystems aims to make the developer’s life as easy as possible and invests all of their R&D with that mission in mind.

To that end, the OutSystems license is driven by how many applications and users are active in the live environment. The assumption is that the number of developers, and the amount of work in progress, will normally be proportional, and the more you develop, the better the ROI on the license.

Now specifically, there are several tools that developers can make use of

• The app dev environment, Service Studio, with its visual development and AI-led accelerators
• Integration Studio to bring in custom code as OutSystems extensions
• Runtime tools in the Service Centre for managing each environment
• The platform management app called Lifetime for CI/CD high-level environment controls.

On top of those standard tools, OutSystems have been investing in user experience and AI since their inception, and have released many additional helper tools that come with no extra cost. For example:

• AI Mentor Studio continually checks your code for consistency and best practices, using 20+ years of development experience to identify antipatterns and their fixes to help keep you right.
• Integration Builder provides a wizard-like approach to connect to most types of databases, plus common enterprise solutions ranging from SAP and Salesforce to Dynamics and SharePoint.
• Workflow Builder gives a flowchart-based simple UI to create processes with automatic and manual steps, user groups and roles, and branching conditions and can be a great start to using the Case Management and Business Process Technology toolset.
• Experience Builder is a set of common mobile app patterns that can accelerate prototyping, especially for Insurance and Banking. This is moving towards a two-way generative AI experience, which we’ll talk more about at a later date.

All those tools can start with a web-based wizard-like approach, but then can be handed off to Service Studio for examination, replication, extension, or adjustment as needed.

Finally, everyone can register on OutSystems.com and make use of the personal environment, documentation, guided training, forums, and 5000+ pre-built components in the Forge Marketplace.

4. Cloud-native by default

This year, OutSystems are encouraging new customers to go straight to the cloud-native edition of the platform, known as the OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC). This platform combines all the enhanced productivity of the earlier generations for how apps are built, but shifts to deploy as containerised microservices, using all the AWS best practices for global scale and performance.

However, the current OutSystems 11 (O11) platform will still be available and supported through at least 2027. The main difference is the hosting model — in O11 the applications generated are regular HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and .NET apps, normally running on an app server with IIS and a database server with SQL server.

So, to scale, in ODC these are boxed up into Kubernetes containers by domain and scaled/replicated at the app level. With O11, we can extend the app server (EC2), and database server (RDS), and add processing and storage capacity, but it’s done at the server level instead, and more constrained by location.

Architecturally, that drives us towards more loosely coupled microservices, and a composable app landscape that promotes reuse and version control across the company domain.

5. No vendor lock-in

Since the applications generated are ‘regular’ application code — HTML / CSS/ reactJS / .NET / SQL — the compiled apps can run without any of the OutSystems platform or environment management tools enabled. If you build out some apps and then decide to stop paying for the license, the applications still belong to you and can be moved to another hosting environment and continue to operate.

At that point, the source code for each module can be made available and included in your source code repository. Any change in hosting or database location may need some adjustments to keep the connections alive, but otherwise, the code can be managed and patched by an experienced developer.

However, the code will be machine-generated — so the ability to navigate through it and extend or maintain it will be limited and will depend heavily on good practices like naming conventions, descriptions, and object identifiers being maintained, to make it readable.

This ability is unique within the low code market — but should only be treated as a one-way process at the end of a contract. We recently executed this process as a trial with one of our customers, and were able to detach, update components, and recompile the solution — after some work.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this helps you understand some of the logic behind the pricing model. Considering the scale of applications that can be built, the model itself is relatively simple — and there are huge advantages to covering the hosting cost within that.

Of course, for any potential application, you can get in touch, and we’d be happy to help look at each situation and work out options for both licensing and services to help you on your way.

For further reading, we’d recommend the Forrester Total Economic Impact report here which independently calculates a 506% ROI on an OutSystems license.

About the author

Andy Borthwick is a Solution Architect here at Version 1.