DevOps tools rife with hidden costs

Research from market intelligence service Delta shows end users extremely concerned by levels of hidden costs across a wide variety of DevOps tools

End users are extremely concerned by the levels of hidden costs in DevOps toolsets according to research from market intelligence service Delta.

Delta conducted a series of interviews and focus groups following a survey answered by hundreds of IT professionals with direct responsibility for DevOps practises in their organisations.

Amongst other findings, concerns around hidden costs came through strongly, with customers of some vendors especially troubled.

Looking at Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tools, users of Jetbrains were the most concerned by hidden costs, closely followed by users of Bamboo, from Atlassian.

Atlassian was bullish in the face of the criticism however, claiming that it is entirely transparent about its pricing.

"Unlike the majority of software vendors, Atlassian publishes all product prices online. Pricing for all of our products is open and transparent, and no part of our website directs the customer to contact us to figure out how much something costs," a representative commented.

He added: "What customers see online is the price they pay. We do not offer any discounts. Our goal is to make awesome applications available at the best price and to treat every customer equally. We like to build discounts directly into the prices we publish openly to everyone so there's no guessing or uncertainty around what you're buying and how much it costs."

Users of Codeship and CloudBees were slightly happier with pricing model transparency, with Shippable customers coming out top, as least concerned by hidden costs.

However, the situation was worse when it came to Configuration Management, with users of every major tool declaring themselves to be highly concerned by hidden costs.

Delta spoke to customers of Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack and Hashicorp, and found all end users to be uniformly unhappy with the pricing models used.

Given that most DevOps tools offer a freemium pricing model, it's highly likely that many organisations start off using them for free before switching to a paid-for model. Then, as they integrate them into their workflow they begin adopting more plug-ins and requiring more licenses, which is when costs can escalate.

For a deeper dive into DevOps, including a thorough examination of what end users think about the solutions they use every day, check our Delta.