On-premise WMS cost
On-premise / self-hosted WMS is still offered by Fishbowl Advanced, SAP EWM decentralized, Infor WMS, Korber HighJump, and Made4net. Where a perpetual licence is still on the table it means licence plus 17-22%/yr maintenance plus hardware plus DBA.
Per-user perpetual bands
SMB: Fishbowl has moved Advanced to a subscription starts-at model (from $595/mo, priced by users and deployment), so a published SMB perpetual anchor no longer exists[s-15]. Mid-market perpetual (model estimate): $800-$2,500 per named user. Tier-1 perpetual: quote-only with steeper per-user list balanced by deeper volume discounting.
17-22% annual
Standard enterprise-software maintenance is 17-22% of perpetual list per year, compounding for 5 years (Oracle's published standard support is 22% of net license fees). Premier support adds 3-5% on top. Self-hosted means you also pay for sandbox refresh and version-upgrade SI hours.
On the balance sheet
App servers, DB licences (Oracle, SQL Server), DR site, backup infrastructure. WMS workloads are bursty; sizing for peak (Black Friday, peak shipping season) means 1.5-2x average headroom.
Buyer questions
When does on-prem still win?
Stable user count above ~150 with sunk hardware, restrictive cloud-data policies, or heavy customisation that vendor cloud editions do not support.
What is the typical DBA cost?
Mid-market on-prem WMS typically warrants 0.5-1.0 FTE of DBA time at $90K-$140K loaded. That is real money over 5 years.