If you’re a current AVEVA PI customer and your last renewal landed with a number you didn’t expect, you’re not alone. Across industries, PI customers are reporting price increases of 2x to 4x compared to what they paid just a few years ago. Some are seeing even steeper jumps.

The system behind those increases is called AVEVA Flex Credits. It replaced the older PI licensing model after Schneider Electric completed its acquisition of AVEVA in 2023. If you’ve tried to figure out exactly what Flex Credits are, how they’re calculated, or why your bill went up so much, you’ve probably noticed that AVEVA makes that information very difficult to find.

This article explains how Flex Credits work, what customers are actually paying based on publicly available procurement data, and what your options are if the model isn’t working for you.

What Are AVEVA Flex Credits?

AVEVA Flex Credits are the unit of currency in AVEVA’s subscription licensing model. Instead of buying a per-server license for PI Data Archive or paying a fixed annual fee per module, you purchase a pool of credits and draw from that pool based on the products and capacities you use.

On paper, this model sounds flexible, buy what you need, scale up or down. In practice, it works differently.

The number of credits consumed by your PI deployment depends on several factors simultaneously:

• Number of PI Data Archive tags. This is the biggest driver for most customers. More tags, more credits.
• Number of PI interfaces. Each interface to a data source draws from the credit pool.
• Number of connected clients and users. PI Vision users, PI DataLink users, and other client connections consume credits.
• Which PI modules you use. PI Notifications, PI Integrators, PI Connectors, and other add-on modules each have their own credit draw.
• Whether you use AVEVA Connect. AVEVA’s cloud offering has its own credit component on top of the base allocation.

None of this is published. AVEVA does not post a credit rate card. You negotiate your credit pool at renewal, and the calculation of how many credits each component consumes is determined by AVEVA’s internal pricing team. If you exceed your allocated pool, you purchase top-up credits at a separate rate.

This design makes it structurally difficult to forecast your costs, compare prices with other customers, or challenge a renewal quote with market data. That opacity is a feature of the model from AVEVA’s perspective, not a bug.

What Customers Are Actually Paying

Because AVEVA doesn’t publish pricing, the clearest window into real-world costs comes from public procurement records, bid documents, contract awards, and government purchasing databases that are subject to disclosure requirements.

Here is what those records show:

Organization Type	Tag Count	Annual Cost	Notes
Mid-size utility	25,000 to 50,000 tags	$108,570/year	Public procurement record. Does not include top-up credits.
Larger industrial deployment	Mid-size estimate	~$162,000/year	Extrapolated from procurement data patterns.
Top-up credits	Per credit	$14.44/credit	Publicly documented rate for over-allocation.

These are not worst-case examples, they’re baseline figures for organizations with moderate PI deployments. Customers with larger tag counts, more interfaces, or multi-server PI architectures report substantially higher figures.

The 2x to 4x price increase pattern comes from comparing current Flex Credit renewals to what those same customers paid under the previous per-server pricing model. The shift isn’t a one-time adjustment. Customers who negotiated their first Flex Credit contracts two or three years ago are now seeing the second and third rounds of renewals, each higher than the last.

Why Prices Are Going Up

Understanding the trajectory requires understanding what happened to OSIsoft.

OSIsoft built the PI System over four decades and accumulated one of the most deeply embedded installed bases in industrial software. In 2021, AVEVA (then itself being acquired by Schneider Electric) paid approximately $5 billion to acquire OSIsoft. That acquisition price, and the subsequent Schneider Electric takeover of AVEVA itself, created significant capital obligations that need to be recouped through the existing customer base.

The engineers and product leaders who built PI’s original reputation have largely moved on following the acquisition. Development pace has slowed. ProcessBook, the visualization client thousands of operators had used for years, hit end-of-life in 2024 with no direct functional replacement. The momentum that once justified PI’s premium pricing, continuous innovation, a growing ecosystem, a strong product roadmap, has not kept pace with the price increases.

What customers are experiencing is the financial mechanics of a large acquisition being worked out through subscription pricing, in a market where their options to leave quickly are constrained by 20 years of data, deeply integrated control system connections, and organizational familiarity with the tools.

AVEVA is aware of this dynamic. The Flex Credit model was designed in part to make switching costs higher, not lower.

What the Flex Credit Model Does to Your TCO

The headline renewal cost is only part of the picture. Three other cost factors compound the Flex Credit problem over time.

PI administration headcount. A PI deployment of any scale requires at least one dedicated PI administrator, and often more. Managing the credit allocation, maintaining interfaces, handling AF model changes, supporting upgrades, and responding to user requests are full-time activities in most PI environments. Those salaries don’t appear on the AVEVA invoice but they belong in any honest total cost comparison.

System integrator costs. Major PI changes, new server deployments, PI Collective configurations for high availability, large AF restructures, PI version upgrades, typically require SI consulting. The knowledge required to manage PI at enterprise scale is specialized, and the pool of qualified PI administrators is not growing. When your PI admin retires, finding a replacement is an increasingly expensive proposition.

The credit trap as you grow. One of the counterintuitive effects of the Flex Credit model is that it penalizes customers for doing more with their data. Adding tag count, connecting new data sources, bringing more users onto PI Vision, all of these legitimate operational improvements draw from the credit pool and accelerate the renewal cost upward. The model structurally discourages exactly the kinds of data expansion that drive operational value.

Your Options

If your Flex Credits renewal is the trigger for this conversation, you have three realistic paths.

Option 1: Negotiate hard at renewal. Some customers have had success pushing back on renewal quotes, particularly if they have competitive quotes in hand. AVEVA does not want to lose large accounts. The risk is that you accept a short-term number without changing the underlying trajectory, and you’ll be in the same position at the next renewal.

Option 2: Reduce your PI footprint before renewal. Auditing your actual tag usage and decommissioning inactive tags or interfaces before the renewal window can reduce your credit draw. This requires PI administration time and a clear picture of what’s actually being used versus what’s been accumulating over years. It’s a legitimate tactic but not a long-term strategy.

Option 3: Evaluate alternatives, on your timeline. This is where most customers with serious Flex Credits frustration eventually land. The good news is that you don’t have to replace PI to start reducing your AVEVA dependency or get more value from the data you already collect.

Transpara reads PI data natively through the AF SDK. You can deploy Transpara on top of your existing PI infrastructure without changing anything about how PI works. Many customers do this first, extend PI’s value, give more people access to operational data, and prove ROI from Transpara, before making any decision about reducing their PI footprint. When they do decide to migrate, Transpara’s tStore can replace PI Data Archive at their pace, without a forced cutover and high risk.

The alternative to per-tag Flex Credits is signal-based pricing that doesn’t meter the historian. No per-tag charges. No credit pools. No top-up surprises.

Comparing Pricing Models: Flex Credits vs. Alternatives

Pricing Factor	AVEVA Flex Credits	Transpara
Per-tag charges	Yes	Simple Packaged Pricing
Per-user charges	Yes	Simple Packaged Pricing
Per-interface charges	Yes	Simple Packaged Pricing
Admin staff required	Yes (dedicated)	No (no full-time staff required)
Renewal predictability	Low (2-4x increases reported)	High
On-prem deployment	Yes, but AVEVA is pushing their SaaS-based Connect offering over on-prem)	Yes, customer-controlled (on-prem, customer cloud, hybrid)
Data stays in your environment	Partially (AVEVA Connect is SaaS, so your data lives with AVEVA)	Yes, always under your control

Before Your Next Renewal: Questions to Ask

If your Flex Credits renewal is coming up, these questions will help you enter that conversation with more leverage, and help you evaluate whether alternatives are worth pursuing seriously.

What is your current credit allocation, and how is it broken down? Ask AVEVA for a full breakdown of credit consumption by component: tags, interfaces, users, modules. If they’re reluctant to provide this in writing, that tells you something.

What drives the increase from your last renewal? AVEVA should be able to explain what changed in their pricing model or your consumption that accounts for the delta. If the answer is vague, push for specifics.

What is the cost trajectory if your tag count grows by 20% over the next three years? Model your likely growth and ask AVEVA to price that scenario. The answer often clarifies the long-term exposure.

What are your switching costs, realistically? This is worth understanding honestly, not to avoid change but to plan it. Years of PI data, embedded control system interfaces, and AF models are real considerations. A phased migration plan reduces switching costs significantly, but you need to know what you’re actually working with.

What does a competitive alternative cost for your footprint? Talking to at least one alternative vendor before a renewal gives you both market data and negotiating leverage. That conversation costs nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does AVEVA publish Flex Credits pricing? No. AVEVA does not publish a Flex Credits rate card or standard pricing. Pricing is negotiated individually with each customer, which makes it structurally difficult to benchmark your quote against market rates.

How are Flex Credits calculated? Credits are consumed based on a combination of PI Data Archive tag count, number of interfaces, number of connected users and client applications, and which PI modules are active in your deployment. The specific credit weighting for each factor is set by AVEVA and is not published.

What are top-up credits? When your PI deployment consumes more credits than your allocated annual pool, you purchase top-up credits to cover the excess. Published procurement data shows a top-up rate of $14.44 per credit. Customers with growing tag counts or expanding user bases often encounter top-up charges between renewal cycles.

Can I reduce my Flex Credits bill by decreasing tag count? Yes, decommissioning unused or redundant tags before a renewal audit can reduce your credit draw. However, identifying which tags are genuinely inactive requires PI administration time, and the process doesn’t change the underlying pricing trajectory for an active deployment.

Is AVEVA Connect required? AVEVA Connect is AVEVA’s cloud offering and is being positioned increasingly as the default deployment path. It is not strictly required for all customers today, but AVEVA’s product direction strongly favors it and most new developments are focused on it. AVEVA Connect has its own credit component and means your PI data moves to AVEVA’s cloud infrastructure rather than staying in your environment, a meaningful consideration for regulated industries and organizations with data residency requirements.

What is the alternative to Flex Credits for PI data? The most direct alternative for organizations that want to keep their PI data but eliminate Flex Credits dependency is to deploy a modern operational intelligence platform that integrates and amplifies the value of PI natively while evaluating and migrating at your own pace with minimal risk.For organizations ready to replace PI Data Archive itself, tStore provides a modern time-series historian, asset modeling, advanced calculation and analytics, visualization and industrial AI platform with pricing and no per-tag fees.

How Transpara Can Help

If real-time operational visibility is a challenge you’re facing, you’re not alone. At Transpara, we help teams like yours gain clarity from complex systems without the need to centralize or overhaul your data stack.
Learn more about Transpara
Browse our documentation
Contact us