Installing, developing and maintaining Open edX is a costly effort, despite the fact that the software is free (90% of the code is open source).
According to Nate Aune, founder of the Appsembler Open edX-cloud provider, “you’re potentially looking at spending up to $920,000 a year to host and implement Open edX yourself”. “Now for some companies, this number may be a drop in the bucket, but for many, the risk of this annual price tag is both unsustainable and unrealistic,” explains in his corporate blog. He recognizes that this projected amount is for a company headquartered in Californian Bay Area, where the engineering talent is very expensive.
“There are two kinds of costs you will incur if you want to run Open edX yourself: people costs and hosting costs. And within each of these, there are one-time costs and recurring costs.” (…) “People roles you need are Software Engineer (with experience in Python, Django, Javascript and Docker); DevOps Engineer (with experience in Linux, Ansible, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ/Redis, Hadoop, and Cloud hosting); and Web Designer (with SASS/HTML5 experience)”.
In terms of the infrastructure, another provider called Perpetual claims that “for a complete production, demo and testing environment set up, the cost goes to $1,829/mo or $21,932/yr.“
