“How do you license the SCORM Engine?”
The SCORM Engine is licensed, in almost every case, under a term, source code license. This license is built to allow you to integrate the SCORM Engine in your application and then license that combined application to your clients. We want you to sell your product as much as you do. And our license entitles you to do that.
Because these license agreements can become complex, we’ve annotated a version of our typical contract. Please be sure to get comfortable with the language here and ask us any questions you have. We want to work with you forever, and believe that having fair and balanced agreements furthers our ability to do that.
“How much does it cost?”
There are two components to the SCORM Engine price. The implementation fee is billed near the time of the Effective Date of the agreement. This is your up-front commitment. It demonstrates your commitment to the project and allows us to hold your hand through the entire implementation process. At every step, we want you to ask as many questions as you like, and we expect to work with you in great detail to achieve a tight integration. Hourly integration arrangements detract from our ability to do this.
The license fee, then, allows us to maintain a piece of software that serves a broad community at a very high level. It is your ongoing contribution to our virtual software cooperative.
Implementation Fee
- With SCORM 2004, $30,000
- Without SCORM 2004, $15,000
Licensing Fee
- Annual Minimum Licensing Fee, $6,000
| Users | Cost (per user per year) |
| 0 – 30,000 | $0.00 (included w/ annual minimum) |
| 30,000 – 249,999 | $0.20 |
| 250,000 – 499,999 | $0.17 |
| 500,000 – 999,999 | $0.14 |
| 1,000,000 – 1,999,999 | $0.11 |
| 2,000,000+ | $0.08 |
“Which of my users are included in these fees?”
All of them. Simplicity is our preference, and many products benefit simply from the ability to say they are conformant. This is a straightforward way for us to establish a relationship between client size and royalties. For this reason, when we request the user count for the purposes of creating invoices, we require that all users who could access SCORM training be included.
Note: We are willing to create agreements based on users who actually access the SCORM Engine as well, at a different price point. For $0.30 per user per year, you may opt to count only users who actually use the SCORM Engine.
Alternate Scaling Mechanisms
Basically, some of our clients don’t sell their products based on the number of users. Some, in fact, have no idea how many users they support in total. This can make our per user licensing structure a real problem for them. In these cases (and certain other cases), we’ve used alternative scaling mechanisms. Provided your suggested scaling mechanism is fair and reasonable, we’re often willing to work in the context of your licensing model, provided our annual minimums are met.
Perpetual Licenses
We generally do not offer perpetual licenses to the SCORM Engine. Since such a big component of its value is our continued responsibility for the evolution of the standard, we find this to map poorly to our ongoing efforts. On the rare occasion where we have agreed to a perpetual license, it has been offered at a substantially higher base cost. If this is fundamentally important to you, please do ask.
“How do you count users?”
Well, basically, we ask you to count them for us. We do reserve the right to audit the counts once a year contractually, but we’ve never done so.
“Is there a low cost SCORM Engine option?”
Our hosted SCORM Cloud product offers a pay-as-you-go option for delivering SCORM content. It’s open API allows it to be easily integrated into your system (although not as tightly as the SCORM Engine). If this is of interest to you, it is easy to sign up for a free trial.
