No this is not a post on how to get free licenses…
There should be no doubt that purchasing LoadRunner licenses is expensive. How Mercury/HP has achieved this stranglehold on the market is strange to behold but it is the way it is.
Needless to say, in another purchasing license cycle I jokingly said to a colleague that it would probably be cheaper to fly to India, hire some office space and PCs, give some training to 100 production workers and pay them 3 months wage to facilitate your whole test effort using real people and PCs. You’d still probably come out ahead of a typical yearly budget for HP products… Or would you?
Estimates in AUD…
Average Indian production worker yearly salary, $2,192
Office space in Pune per month, $753
Return business class flights for me and a business partner/trainer, $12,000
Rental PC/laptop fleet per month, $10,000
Average cost of test effort over 3 months would be $105,000
I think you might come out with some change from that… 
What a unexpected and interesting calculations!
Yes, it can be a good alternative to using of HP LoadRunner.
hah.. the costs are indeed ridiculous (same issue with SilkPerformer), so I try to stay with Open Source and home-brewed tools.
I like your idea. I wonder if you could have the guys train themselves night and day after the 3 months. You could keep a few guys on staff 24/7 for the same price as a yearly maintenance contract.
Tim,
Very funny (and a bit sad too). The calculations you did are some of the same ones I did when setting out to create BrowserMob, a new external load testing service.
I realized that most commercial alternatives charged so much that it was possible to use a MUCH more expensive technology approach (we use a real web browser for every virtual user, which costs 10-100X more than HTTP emulation) and still be able to undercut pretty much everyone on pricing.
We ended up with a $1/VU/hour model, which if run continually for 3 months probably would be quite pricey, but for most use cases I think we end up quite affordable.
Patrick
It has always amazed me how expensive LR is. And if you need to xfer some VUsers from one license to another in the same organization you have to be prepared to bend over and grab your ankles. Need to add some vusers for a project? Yep. Same action.
For competition to LR I like VS2008 Team Suite Test Edition (what, you can write HTTP virtual users with a language that has true string manipulation and regex support natively and don’t have to perform a bunch of C pointer manipulation? Shocking!) and JMeter.
I prefer to work with the coded web test with VS2008 but you can’t beat the pricing on JMeter.
I have never had a chance to use The Grinder 3 but it too seems pretty darn cool (and once again, can’t beat the price).
All in all, I like your thought experiment.
I have to think that the salesmen at HP/Mercury must be great that their job do be able to get such a stranglehold on the market. LR really needs to update their engine to allow Java/.NET development for HTTP vusers.