See the History page for more, but to focus in on the cost advantage… In 2010, Craig Jackson (with LAS@UIC at the time) embarked on a collaborative, multi-campus, multi-unit endeavor to acquire an enterprise license of Sitefinity. At the time, the enterprise license included…
- rights for unlimited sub-domains of licensed “parent” domain (in our case, uic.edu and illinois.edu)
- rights for unlimited instances of the product
In other words — this license offers unlimited instances for unlimited domains under uic.edu and illinois.edu. That’s a lot of value.
The cost for renewal of this “grandfathered” license from 2010, is just under $7000 annually. Shared among units using it (there are currently five) — the cost to each unit is ~$1300. Because it is already licensed, units coming on board can begin to use it immediately, with a commitment to share in the annual renewal cost each November.
Since 2010, Sitefinity has become a market-leader, and its cost has risen — its licensing model changed — accordingly to a position that is more in alignment with peer market leaders.
If we were to license (anew) the product using a domain-based model today for all of the uic.edu and illinois.edu sites using Sitefinity, the price-tag would be well over >$100,000. As of this writing, a single Enterprise License for a single domain alone (with no sub-domains), would cost ~$15,000.
Summary:
All sites within uic.edu and illinois.edu are already licensed. The cost for a unit to use Sitefinity for an uic.edu or illinois.edu domain and to run their own instance(s) is approximately $1300 annually (~$7,000 / the-number-of-units-using-Sitefinity). The more units using Sitefinity, the smaller the per-unit cost is.
Note: Multi-Site Manager (MSM) was not part of the Enterprise License in 2010. In 2014, LAS@UIC and Education at Illinois each bought a license for Multi-Site Manager for each parent domain (uic.edu and illinois.edu). Cost-sharing is available for Multi-Site Manager as well — for those sites interested in it. Renewal cost for MSM for each parent domain is $6,000.