No this is not a post on how to get free licenses…

There should be no doubt that purchasing LoadRunner licenses is expensive. How Mercury/HP has achieved this stranglehold on the market is strange to behold but it is the way it is.

Needless to say, in another purchasing license cycle I jokingly said to a colleague that it would probably be cheaper to fly to India, hire some office space and PCs, give some training to 100 production workers and pay them 3 months wage to facilitate your whole test effort using real people and PCs. You’d still probably come out ahead of a typical yearly budget for HP products… Or would you?