The cost of blogging

Six Apart has come out with the pricing for Ver. 3.0 of its Movable Type blogging tool (sorry, for their "publishing system").

A commercial license will set you back $700. That's not really all that outrageous for good quality software (we spent $500 for the software we use for our research links), but even for all that, the Ver. 3.0 license limits you to 15 Weblogs. We already have way more "blogs" than that (we're using Movable Type to power the reporter notes on all our research-center pages and use it on our intranet). I *might* be able to scrounge up $700 (well, $600 if I order now), but I'm really doubting our finance people would appreciate an unbudgeted bill for $1,400 (minus the $45 discount we'd get for the $300 in commercial MT licenses we've already purchased, that is).

So our options are: Look for an alternative platform (hmm, Drupal, the open-source tool we're using for our new Feeds aggregator, has blogs built in); move our research-pages to our fancy-shmancy content management system (but then we'd lose the commenting function which was the main reason we put them in Movable Type to begin with). Or stick with Movable Type 2.6x, which is working just fine for us now.

As a consultant, Ari Paparo has recommended MT to corporate clients, in part because of how easy it was to add new blogs and authors. Now, he writes: Time to update the PowerPoint:

"Now I've got to get the client's (usually skeptical) IT department involved, figure out exactly what license I need before starting, and pony up $600(!) for what was previously $140."

If you use Movable Type, I'd be interested to hear what you're thinking.