TestingBudget

Licensing & Infra

Cost per licence, per year

What one seat, runner or subscription unit of the tool costs for a year — the number on the quote.

Unit
money per licence per year
Where you enter it
Licensing & Infra tab, per vendor.

What it means

The tool's yearly price per licensed unit, whatever the vendor's unit is: a named user, a concurrent user, a parallel runner, a tenant. Multiplied by licences needed it gives the vendor's yearly licence cost, which is counted once across the whole workspace and apportioned to applications by their share of test cases.

Manual approaches carry a licence too where a test-management tool is used; a spreadsheet is free.

Why it matters to the cost

The licence is the most visible number in an evaluation and often the smallest of the four cost lines. This model exists to put it in proportion: a $30,000 licence next to $60,000 of maintenance saved is a good deal, and next to $5,000 saved it is not.

Typical values

Categories vary from nothing (open-source frameworks, spreadsheets) through per-seat test-management tools to quoted enterprise platforms; we do not publish prices for named products.

Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.

Try it with your numbers

Cost per licence, per year is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.

See how cost per licence, per year impacts the calculation of test automation costs

Last reviewed 2026-09-15. All terms.