LMS Pricing Experience Insight Please

General
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Our company has been exploring a new LMS solution for our growing company. We currently use LearnUpon which is just fine, nothing to write home about, but seems to be intended for a use that is not a use case for us.

We do NOT use our LMS for internal employee training, instead ALL of our clients are external so an eCommerce component is a MUST for us. We also operate with the guidelines given by a state agency with a 2 year renewal period.

We’ve had a few discovery calls with some LMS’s but have not received formal pricing from anyone and all of this has given me a question…

The companies I’ve spoken to thus far SEEM like ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions or OOTB with customization options but have SOOOO many features we’ll just never use. In fact we need a very basic system in some ways with an atypical set of bells and whistles.

The question I keep coming back to is weather it will be more cost effective to go with:

  • Something OOTB and have a developer customize where we need customization
  • A company that offers a more customized experience but still includes unnecessary bells and whistles
  • A completely custom option that can cut out the extras that some find desirable but we’ve just found unnecessary (List of must haves/don’t wants: LMS List.docx)

(some things to note would be a community or gamification or learning paths - we use none of that but still need robust reporting and ideally a way to track users progress per 2 year renewal period in our industry.)

My initial opinion is that a completely custom option would be well out of our budget but as I explore customization LMS’s I have to wonder if the price tag of bells and whistles can be cut down by just NOT having them.

Our current deal with LU is not very customizable (Not our contract, just LU itself) and we’re spending about $20k a year. We’re totally fine with active user pricing which seems to be the norm.

If anyone has any experience comparing these solutions to one another or insight into pricing or even a company that fits the bill I’d love to hear from you. Thanks all!

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You can use CourseLit for free if you can self host on your own servers.

Let me know if you need help setting it up.

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Here’s my thoughts on your options:

Something OOTB and have a developer customize where we need customization: It might be more cost-effective than building from scratch, but you’ll still pay for features you don’t need and you’ll be strapped to a high-cost developer

A company that offers a more customized experience but still includes unnecessary bells and whistles: this is probably your best option, as it sounds like customization is a must

A completely custom option that can cut out the extras that some find desirable but we’ve just found unnecessary: usually the most expensive. Development, maintenance, and updates can add up quickly.

For 700-900 learners, $20,000 a year is actually a pretty good price for most LMSs!
What levels of customization do you need (ex: ecommerce, fonts/branding, colors, photos, etc?) This could help me with some research.

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I agree on the price. We are paying $11,000 for 200 seats a year.

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Are you designing the courses within the LMS or using a scorm builder like articulate?

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Articulate/Storyline is where we build our courses.

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