Hi Koha-ers Thanks for the responses so far - I realise now i should have framed things a little differently: It's more a question of 'how much work is involved', and then calculating out the relative costs from there... So far, responses have all included that kind of information - and I'll probably frame up any rough 'cost' information based on the descriptions of work involved, for people to take away and play 'choose-your-consultant-fees/salary' with. I hadn't thought much about the social effect of free software - thanks for that point, Andres. And by the way - $US20 and hour is still a decent rate in Australia [bit still below the horizon of most unix people], and EU700 a day a small fortune. But in the end, you're likely to spend as much at $US20 an hour as EU700 a day, depending on the relative experience of the consultants involved... Thanks all Adam.

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Andres Tarallo <tarallo@ort.edu.uy> - 31/8/04 10:11 AM >>> Fine question, but dificult to answer. When you choose a free software

based solution you may have smaller aquisiton costs in the software side (you don't pay for licences), but you might have the same cost in services or salaries. The salaries varies a lot from country to country, U$S 20 an hour is a VERY good salary in my country (Uruguay, think in argentina is the same) and 700 Euros a day is a little fortune (Who should I kill ?). For developing countries most free software solutions are far more convenient, and they have a social effect: money is earned by people who live in the country, pay taxes there and use the money there. Andres Adam Steer wrote:

Hi Koha people

What are the average costs of a Koha install? There's plenty of discussion about buying library systems around the traps here, and I realised that there's no real 'throwaway' numbers out there to allow people to make a comparison with slickly-marketed paid systems...

So, if anyone is happy to do so, would it be possible to grab a few rough numbers for things like initial installation and setup, and any ongoing maintenance?

Along with the numbers, any relevant data that affects the cost would be useful - ie number of sites, number of records to be transferred, time it took to move from system X to koha...

The whole aim is to be able to say 'well, for your average school library, it might cost something like $xxxx if you need an external contractor to install and configure things..' - before having to go through the quoting process. A couple of ballpark figures might be handy..

If people see a useful purpose for such data, I'll compile a set of average numbers and send it back for the FAQ...

Cheers - and thanks!

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