I can't share pricing details since they are confidential but if you just want to play with MIP you don't need to buy one of the big three (XPRESS, Gurobi, CPLEX) which are all very expensive but usually available for free for students. There are at least two good open source / free for non-commercial use MIP solvers available:
I've used both. They are waaaaaaaaaay faster, waaaay more reliable, and actually have support. You're not going to want to run your product that is responsible for millions off of something without really solid support.
You can get a temporary free license for Gurobi. You are limited to a 1000 node problem size, but you can learn how to use the tool and set up your problem.
If you have a problem that needs Gurobi, it’s worth paying for it. Talk with their sales team. They are happy to help you get started. They know once you know how to use it, and how it can solve problems you will be inclined to use it in the future.
> If you have a problem that needs Gurobi, it’s worth paying for it.
Thit statement is baed on the assumption that it is a "big money" problem. On the other hand, I know lots of problems interesting to nerds for which Gurobi would help (but nerds don't have the money).
If you have a "nerdy" problem you can probably get someone to write it up as a research paper and then it would easily fall under the academic license. To some extent, if you're buying a commercial license you're just paying for secrecy.
This is not true: to get an academic license of Gurobi, you have to be a member of a degree-granting academic institution (otherwise every person could easily (illegally) get one):
Plus, the setup is really fucking annoying... The number of times I had to reactivate my academic license of gurobi while in uni...
The speed is totally worth it though, literally orders of magnitude better than any alternative for wide problem classes. Plus the bindings are good enough that you rarely ever need to drop into c++
If you can't even get a random member of any degree-granting institution (could just be random research staff, a student or adjunct faculty) to take some interest in your optimization problem as a subject for publishable research, does it even qualify as a "nerdy" problem?
Their price list wasn't that confidential last I spoke with the sales team. It depends on the license type. Last I heard, it's around $15k/year for a standard subscription license. You can probably trial it for free, or be a student and have longer free access.
What I've heard - and obviously I can't confirm this - is that their only pricing tier is "call us" - at which point they try to figure out how much money you're making and ask for a slice of it.
Heh, given all of the whispering, I was imagining something 10x the price. I am a nobody and have at least one license to a different product that is some $13k annual.
It’s much cheaper than making suboptimal decisions slowly. Free solvers are fine for small problems (GLPK, for example), but lots of business problems are pretty much impossible to solve in the timeframe required unless you fork over cash for a premium solver (Gurobi being the best).
The last time I checked about a decade ago, a full license with multiple users and on a server was around 100k USD. I don't recall exact number of seats or server count restrictions.
I want to add that, for many in the industry, it is well worth the price.
The best MIP solvers (CPLEX, GUROBI, FICO) are all extremely expensive unless you're an academic. The free ones are fine for smaller problems. Some like Mosek are quite affordable and a good middle ground. To most organizations, the cost is reasonable for what they're getting.
Estimate something in the ballpark of 10.000-15.000 USD per seat for a core-limited license (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277010), and quite much more money for a network license.
It's not cheap but actually quite reasonable and the quality is very good vs free solvers. If you are building a product that needs MILP it's worth it.
Test case for your claim: someone privately intensively develops some open-source product that uses Gurobi as optimization backend. I guess on-demand will become very expensive.
> It would be best to develop against open models and plug Gurobi in separately in this situation I expect.
That is basically what I did in the end.
> If you are working on a problem that NEEDS Gurobi's level of quality, someone will pay you to build it
Here I vehemently disagree: there exist quite a lot of problems that would insanely profit from a great MILP solver:
- Only a small subset of these problems have a (huge) commercial potential (i.e. are suitable for making some customer money).
- Even if there exists an insane commercial potential, building great applications/models, and being able to convince someone with huge pockets (or even get access to them) are completely unrelated skills.
