As Brian Ripley remarks, the community of S and S-PLUS users is a very active and open one. The s-news discussion group is frequently used to obtain helpful advice from other users for a particular problem and the library of S functions maintained in an archive by Carnegie Mellon University called statlib provides a broad range of additional useful functions and contributed by other users. A once only fee is charged for the initial Software Licence. In addition, users may take out an annual Software Maintenance Agreement which will entitle the user to receive any new update that is released for their licensed platform. The Software Maintenance fee is payable annually in advance.
Prices are for single server licences.
At the time of publication, the Software Licence prices started at 695 for a single DOS copy and 995 for a single user Unix licence. The Software Maintenance prices are usually just under one third of the Software Licence price.