I've heard Gurobi is fairly expensive. Anyone willing to share pricing details?
If you have a problem that needs Gurobi, it’s worth paying for it. Talk with their sales team. They are happy to help you get started. They know once you know how to use it, and how it can solve problems you will be inclined to use it in the future.
Thit statement is baed on the assumption that it is a "big money" problem. On the other hand, I know lots of problems interesting to nerds for which Gurobi would help (but nerds don't have the money).
> https://www.gurobi.com/academia/academic-program-and-license...
"You must be a faculty member, student, or staff of a recognized degree-granting academic institution.
[...]
To activate your license, you must connect from a recognized academic network."
The speed is totally worth it though, literally orders of magnitude better than any alternative for wide problem classes. Plus the bindings are good enough that you rarely ever need to drop into c++
- Timefold Solver (not MIP, focussed on vehicle routing, job scheduling, shift rostering, etc): http://solver.timefold.ai
- Several solvers at COIN-OR: https://www.coin-or.org/
- Choco
I want to add that, for many in the industry, it is well worth the price.
Data point: https://www.solver.com/gurobi-solver-engine-lpmip-software A plugin for some software that contains a Gurobi license specific to this product costs 10.500 USD.
Rather: if you are building a product that will for sure make a lot of money, and needs MILP, it's worth it.
A lot of product concepts that nerds create are very innovate, but are often some private side projects.
Test case for your claim: someone privately intensively develops some open-source product that uses Gurobi as optimization backend. I guess on-demand will become very expensive.
If you are working on a problem that NEEDS Gurobi's level of quality, someone will pay you to build it (and probably keep it closed source.)
That is basically what I did in the end.
> If you are working on a problem that NEEDS Gurobi's level of quality, someone will pay you to build it
Here I vehemently disagree: there exist quite a lot of problems that would insanely profit from a great MILP solver:
- Only a small subset of these problems have a (huge) commercial potential (i.e. are suitable for making some customer money).
- Even if there exists an insane commercial potential, building great applications/models, and being able to convince someone with huge pockets (or even get access to them) are completely unrelated skills.