If I have to say anything - and I almost hesitate to say anything because Windward has been such a good partner for us and such a good company - I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up. If you look at Microsoft or Oracle or SAP, everybody raises the prices on their software, including us. That's the only thing that I'm hearing customers squeal about, the price of the software, vis-à-vis the functionality. There are a lot of software applications out there with far greater functionality that are actually cheaper than Windward.
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Feb 7, 2019
The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user and we're only going to ever have two or three of those. And the licenses are perpetual. If those were subscription prices, if they were annual prices, that would be quite expensive. We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable.
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Jan 21, 2019
Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me. I have discussed this with them a couple of times, that for testing and development environments it shouldn't be priced that high. That's an area of improvement I would suggest.
The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. We compared Windward vs Crystal Reports, and their pricing structure is not the same. With Crystal Reports, you buy a license at one point in time, and that's it.
The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is. Regardless of what the price is, it's still more cost-effective than some of the other reporting tools out there.
From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good. You do get something back for your money. So that's good. We work in the Caribbean with small island developing states (SIDS). We do notice for some small island communities the license costs are a real bottleneck. So we cannot implement this solution in their environments because the license costs are too steep. It's a matter of a scaling disadvantage in this region because some islands just have 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants and they need a whole independent IT system for tax administration. That's a big investment for such a small community. Sometimes, just because of cost savings, we cannot implement the preferred solution. That's part of being here in the Caribbean. You need some kind of scale to be able to afford something like $16,000 to $17,000, for a document generation solution, and we are not always able to reach that scale with our customers here. That simply eliminates Windward as an option. It limits the business of Windward in this region.
This is tough to say, because we have a contract with them, where we we sell it for use with our application only, in a package bundle. We're reselling it to our clients, so I can't really comment on what they might sell to somebody that was going to use it in-house. We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady.
The ability for Windward to be licensed as a black-box and to be retained in our servers behind our firewall was an absolute must in our business model. Without this, licensing would not be possible.
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Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high.
It's a quick setup, and the license is on an individual basis. I'm not part of the cost or pricing conversations with our clients.
If I have to say anything - and I almost hesitate to say anything because Windward has been such a good partner for us and such a good company - I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up. If you look at Microsoft or Oracle or SAP, everybody raises the prices on their software, including us. That's the only thing that I'm hearing customers squeal about, the price of the software, vis-à-vis the functionality. There are a lot of software applications out there with far greater functionality that are actually cheaper than Windward.
The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user and we're only going to ever have two or three of those. And the licenses are perpetual. If those were subscription prices, if they were annual prices, that would be quite expensive. We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable.
Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me. I have discussed this with them a couple of times, that for testing and development environments it shouldn't be priced that high. That's an area of improvement I would suggest.
The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. We compared Windward vs Crystal Reports, and their pricing structure is not the same. With Crystal Reports, you buy a license at one point in time, and that's it.
The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is. Regardless of what the price is, it's still more cost-effective than some of the other reporting tools out there.
From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good. You do get something back for your money. So that's good. We work in the Caribbean with small island developing states (SIDS). We do notice for some small island communities the license costs are a real bottleneck. So we cannot implement this solution in their environments because the license costs are too steep. It's a matter of a scaling disadvantage in this region because some islands just have 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants and they need a whole independent IT system for tax administration. That's a big investment for such a small community. Sometimes, just because of cost savings, we cannot implement the preferred solution. That's part of being here in the Caribbean. You need some kind of scale to be able to afford something like $16,000 to $17,000, for a document generation solution, and we are not always able to reach that scale with our customers here. That simply eliminates Windward as an option. It limits the business of Windward in this region.
This is tough to say, because we have a contract with them, where we we sell it for use with our application only, in a package bundle. We're reselling it to our clients, so I can't really comment on what they might sell to somebody that was going to use it in-house. We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady.
The ability for Windward to be licensed as a black-box and to be retained in our servers behind our firewall was an absolute must in our business model. Without this, licensing would not be possible.