Continuent Tungsten Subscription Pricing
Annual Software Subscriptions
Continuent offers its Tungsten Clustering solution (for MySQL HA/DR/Geo-Scale) via an annual subscription based on the number of database nodes in the deployment. A simple 3-node cluster starts at about $16,000 per year, but due to non-linear pricing (see below), the per node cost comes down significantly when the deployment size grows and we also have special pricing for smaller startups and also competitive upgrade options those replacing their existing MySQL HA solutions.
Continuent also offers Tungsten Replicator, an advanced MySQL replication solution for homogeneous (MySQL to MySQL deployment) and heterogeneous (MySQL to various other database targets such as AWS Redshift, Vertica, Hadoop, PostgreSQL and more!
24/7 Support Subscriptions
Due to the business-critical 24/7 nature of our customers' operations (SaaS vendors, ecommerce, financial services, gaming companies and telco providers, etc.), Continuent offers only 24/7/365 rapid-response support - provided by highly experienced engineers.
The cost of our 24/7 support depends on the size and complexity of the deployment. The annual support cost starts at $12,000 per year.
Benefits of Multi-Year Software Subscriptions
Due to the long-term nature of the infrastructure investments (some of our customers have stayed with us over 15 years), most Continuent customers have opted for a multi-year subscription commitment.
The benefits of the multi-year subscription include:
- Multi-Year Discount: up to 15% discount on 3-year commitment
- Price-Lock during the subscription agreement period: Continuent updates its pricing every two years. The previous update was in April 2023 and the next price change will take place in April 2025.
- True-Up Policy: Customers are allowed to add additional Tungsten subscription free of charge during the agreed subscription period. The additional subscription will be taken into account during the next renewal cycle, without any retroactive financial impact.
Startup and Competitive Discounts
The minimum cost of the Tungsten Clustering deployment will be some $30K per year for a single MySQL HA cluster and $45K per year for a MySQL HA/DR cluster running in two datacenters or two cloud regions.
That said, Continuent has aggressive discounts available for smaller start-ups (companies with less than $10M in annual revenue) and those who consider replacing Galera (aka XtraDB Cluster) or other MySQL HA/DR clustering solution you may currently have.
Besides these generous discounts, Continuent also offers free trials (24/7 support not included) for up to 12 months.
The Lowest Total Cost of Ownership
Our average customer invests over $100,000 per year on Tungsten software and support subscriptions, many of them for well over ten years. Some, such as Adobe Marketo and Adobe Sign, have been with us over 15 years. They have made a ‘smart money’ decision, reaping 10x to 100x Return On Investment.
Open source solutions are often perceived as free. Yet, one should not assume that Continuent’s commercial offering is more expensive than a ‘free’ open-source alternative when it comes to TCO.
In reality, patching together components from various open-source tools to cover your needs will cost you time and money - much more than you might expect — and still will expose you to potentially significant financial risks (lost revenue, lost customers) when downtime occurs.
For a TCO calculation, ones needs to factor in the cost of:
- the software (purchased or internally developed);
- maintaining the software in ever-changing environments;
- staffing for the database administration and 24/7 support;
- scalability and refactoring the data services;
- performance (latency) and efficiency (full utilization of the compute instances);
- the regular maintenance downtime (zero-downtime maintenance would be preferred);
- the unexpected downtime due to a failure (high availability and disaster recovery).
Besides the initial development and deployment cost, those loosely-coupled, home-grown open-source mash-ups are often quite expensive to develop, support, and maintain. Also note that if you lose the original developer of the in-house solution, you may be completely out of luck.
Continuent offers a complete, tested, and proven tightly-integrated MySQL clustering solution for HA and DR (incl. built-in proxies and orchestration via the cluster manager), combined with 24/7 support at a very cost-effective price.
As a summary, with Continuent you pay for the use of our software and access to our 24/7 support. But you do not pay for development of the software, nor for the maintenance of the software (Tungsten comes with free updates/upgrades), and you need fewer resources for your Database Administration. And what actually is often the biggest hidden cost, the Downtime, you have none with Zero Downtime Maintenance and No Downtime due to a Failure.
Fast and Knowledgeable Continuent Tungsten 24/7 Support
Continuent offers only one level of support for business-critical and mission-critical needs: 24/7/365 featuring industry-leading rapid response times with all cases handled by our highly experienced, knowledgeable team.
We intend to keep it this way. 24/7 only. Our customers’ business-critical needs deserve the industry's best support.
The average response time for urgent support requests, across all of our customers during the past two years, is an amazing 3 minutes or less. This is the best, by far, within our industry.
Also, a very noteworthy fact is that the people who provide support have 15 to 20 years of experience with a MySQL DBA and/or SaaS site reliability engineering background. Continuent 24/7 support is by default Tungsten-specific, but since our solution is tightly-coupled to MySQL, we do end up dealing with MySQL issues too. That said, we do not replace your DBA team, we augment them with our deep MySQL knowledge.
The Tungsten 24/7 annual support subscription fee is based on the size and complexity of your deployment. Continuent charges an annual flat fee for the 24/7 standby services plus a percentage of the total value of the deployment.
We value our support services very highly, so support fee discounts are not available.
Continuent Non-Linear Pricing
Continuent is a commercial solution for open source databases, yet we want to match the open source pricing approach and logic as closely as possible.
Continuent pricing is non-linear. This means that the larger the deployment, the lower the per-node unit pricing becomes for Tungsten Cluster. Once a customer's deployment has grown large enough, additional nodes become practically free-of-charge.
Another way the customer benefits is with our ‘true-up policy’, which allows for the addition of new nodes free-of-charge during the agreed-upon subscription period.
For larger Continuent Tungsten deployments, a site license pricing model is also available.
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