Cost of ETL tools

Did you recall the cost of databases chapter? Well, getting price of ETL tools even harder work.

There was not a single ETL vendor (other than open source ones) who feature their price on their website.

If you ring them up for their price, they will ask you so many questions you will be confused more than ever (it is as irritating as answering questions while you apply for your car insurance).

Some ETL vendors are very snob! They may refuse to sell you their product unless they think your organization is qualified enough to use their product! This is definitely not a problem for multinational enterprise companies but it is indeed a problem for small/medium enterprises that don’t have that much budget or exposure. It will be interesting to observe if recent economic downturn would have changed their outlook (nowadays they sometimes do give freebies like an extra product thrown with no cost).

All I can tell you that major ETL software (Ab Initio, Informatica, Data Stage) licenses do cost in the region of ~ $500,000 for a typical large organization.

The table below gives you an approximate idea of cost.

ETL	Price	Demo/ Try before buy
Ab Initio	$ 250,000 for Co-operating system per CPU $ 10,000 per GDE $ 500,000 for EME now their price is based on Specint (faster processor = you pay more)	No
Informatica	? + mandatory database cost for repository	Yes, you can download working version from Oracle’s site (yes Oracle’s)
Data Stage	$ 55,000 - $ 110,000 per CPU	?
Oracle Warehouse Builder	?	Yes, you can download working version from Oracle’s site
Talend Open Studio	$ 10,000 per year per user	Yes
Expressor	Depends on channel which is a confusing concept introduced by them. See their website.	No