Licensing & Invoicing

For 11 years, the CATME system had been fully maintained through funding from the United States National Science Foundation. The significant burden of maintaining the system (including hardware, software, and instructor support) made it necessary that we institute a user license fee starting July 1st, 2017. In its 15th year, CATME has grown to serve over 18,000 instructor accounts and over 1,470,772 student users to date at over 2,200 educational institutions in 85 countries. CATME operates as a Recharge Center (not-for-profit) within the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, which means that we collect only enough to cover our costs.

The CATME license fee is based on the number of unique students assigned to surveys. CATME’s licensing period begins on July 1st annually and ends June 30th of the next year. A CATME license provides unlimited CATME use in the current license year for instructors and students. Instructor and student CATME data will also be retained indefinitely at the instructor's discretion for historical, grading, or research access at no charge. The license fee is fixed at the beginning of the license year, and adjustments to the unique student count license fee will be made upon renewal, one year in arrears. 

The total license fee is based on all the unique students under instructors in the previous academic year. This amount will determine what pricing tier your license will fall under, based on the table below.

LY 2021-2022 New Pricing Tier Announcement: Cost accountants at Purdue have informed us that our average license cost since 2017 of $2/student/year has not been covering our IT and Customer support costs. In response to this, we have implemented some cost-cutting measures, but since we are operating on a net-zero-balance (non-profit) basis, we also must manage the uncovered expenses from previous years. To these ends, we have adopted the new pricing tiers shown in the table below. We have received feedback from many users that our license fees are very reasonable – and still will be even with this increase when it is implemented. Nevertheless, we realize that this increase will be a burden on many of our users, and we regret the need for the higher cost. Our vision has always been that “no student will have an unmanaged team experience,” and we don’t want cost to get in the way of that vision – yet we need to cover the costs of system maintenance and customer support.

Canvas Integration: If your institution chooses to integrate Canvas LMS, there will be a one-time charge of $2012.

Due to an increase in Purdue's overhead rate, new prices will be in effect starting July 1, 2024.

An official invoice from Purdue University will be sent to you or your billing contact containing the dollar amount of the license fee and the information needed to complete payment. If you have used CATME in the past, you will receive your invoice annually before July 1st. If you are a new user to CATME and your institution/department does not have a license yet, you will receive your invoice shortly following the first survey creation. Invoice requests can also be sent to licensing@catme.org.

There are four types of CATME licenses available:

  1. An individual license is available for any instructor who is interested in using CATME for creating teams or using peer feedback tools.
  2. A departmental license covers all instructors within a given department at an institution. Each unique student across the department is only counted once. If multiple departments have departmental licenses at the same institution, each student list will only be unique within the departments. Duplicate students within a department are counted once; duplicates across two different departments are counted twice.
  3. An institutional license covers all instructors within an entire institution. All students will only be counted once across the institution.
  4. Another licensing option available for instructors is “Student Pay.” With student pay, instructors/institutions do not need to pay for their CATME license. Instead, instructors can have their students pay a small fee for their CATME use through a local agent at your university, such as a bookstore. Now, University of Texas Medical Branch and University of North Carolina Charlotte are using this licensing option. If you are interested in this feature, please contact us at licensing@catme.org for more information.

Unless there is already an existing license for your department, school/college, or institution, CATME will assign an individual or department license to your account by default. Different license options must be requested at licensing@catme.org. All licenses allow unlimited CATME use for students and instructors.

If you wish to be notified about the charge before the invoice is sent, CATME can produce a quote. This quote contains the information needed to fully understand your upcoming invoice and can be useful for documentation purposes or for requesting purchase order numbers. To request a quote for your CATME license, please email licensing@catme.org.

If you require more assistance, see our updated FAQs, or contact us at licensing@catme.org. We can help you set up your license, adjust the type of license you have, and assist you with other inquiries.

If the CATME terms make you confused, please check the definition on the CATME Terms Instructor Dictionary page.