Claris site is currently adding up to $1140 U.S. for 5 users for a year. $19 per user per month for "Essentials" plan.
During all this thread, I was just kicking around the idea of putting up an FMS server where I could create little helpful apps for clients and do other things like that. Obviously, in that case, a client would never have to get a license. So, just with that way of doing business, it's now already $2,700 for just five connections ... per year. The $8,100 for how I was going to use FileMaker Server is just a plain no-go. No way.
My Oracle one CPU license is only $17,500.
Most clients wouldn't pay anything so there's indirect, if any, "ROI". That wouldn't be the goal anyway -- at least not for a while. With all due respect to some, it's not always about ROI.
I would probably be willing to pay $299/year or something like that for a subscription (five user) and maybe $999 for a perpetual license with concurrent connections. Definitely not in sync with FMI's pricing scheme.
I didn't get these final numbers until today so I was holding out some kind of hope.
I'm currently setting up a (free) phpBB site for my clients instead. It's not what I was hoping to do, but FMS was just something I was researching to see if it would work. OK, it won't. I'm also going to just create some web content from scratch (JSP pages, etc.).
It's all good. I'm happy if FMI is happy with their prices.
We can close this thread now since I'm done with my research.
Thanks Wim.
Have a look at On-premise FileMaker Server pricing â Claris
I guess you have seen $ 19.00 / user / month. That's for Cloud (but not mentionsed).
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Yes, @planteg is right.
We were talking about the AWS off-site FMS option, not Cloud.
FM Cloud is also a no-go as it does not support JDBC.
Please note that prices are different in other countries.
I just picked the USD prices from US store.
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If you need a test server, get FDS for $99 and a test server license is included.
Yes, thanks for the link. A typical and curious solution seeker would be hard-pressed to find the route to the "special" pricing.
I’ve had FDS before.
Testing server was not how I was going to proceed. Don’t need a testing server.
But, thanks for your posting. 
That would be called 'shared hosting' and is expressly prohibited by the license. You can't host multiple solutions for multiple clients on a single FMS.
Started back in FM 14 or 15 I believe.
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And that ties it all back to the license model they have been shifting towards since then: you don't license a particular part of the platform (the client, the server, FM Go,...), you license the user and with that you get the use of the whole platform, all clients and server.
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Thanks for your follow ups.
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I'm primarily a Java and Python developer (and JS as required), but neither tool really shines creating front ends, though for running machine learning models a front-end really isn't critical as one example. The data handling capabilities alone in just the one Python library "Pandas" is jaw-droppingly powerful and amazing.
I will watch the video link you included, but I'm spoiled with Java and Python as there are thousands of free add-in libraries -- such as for machine learning for Python (scikit-learn). For statistical computing, I'm also programming in R (free) which has become more and more popular -- now the 9th most popular language/environment (Java (free), 2nd most popular, Python (free), 3rd most popular).
https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
Therefore, with very mature (free, open source) Inversion-of-Control (IoC) Java (and .NET) web frameworks like Spring and considering you can easily do almost anything you could dream up with Java, I'd be hard pressed to move to yet another small proprietary vendor and start coding in BASIC. However, I would still consider xojo as a possible second tier once they go open source.
FMS is officially out of the running for me now based how my business works and what I've recently learned about, and am dumbfounded by, their "pricing" and narrow usage allowances (I imagine many consultants and other companies would be in the same boat as I am on this).
I had already tried to sell FMS solutions (myself on one client and two client prospects working with another company) to three separate clients using the "allowed" FMS approach, spending weeks on proposals and such -- only to be laughed out of the client's office or simply told "no" when they learned it was "FileMaker" and about the associated show-stopper FMS prices (relative to what they already had or were paying). I gave up a long while back on this route...
But, for my personal stuff (all that's left), I wouldn't imagine being able to re-create FMP's ease or speed of data app creation. So, that's $197 every three years, maybe, to FMI. Hurray! 
I'll say again, IMHO, I believe FMS is a fantastic product, ruined (unnecessarily) by licensing and usage restrictions (and "metering", but that's another story).
Thanks Mark.
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Yes of course: I mean I use FDS for Development testing only. Poor wording by me!
I have worked with Python and couldn't find anything that would simply work, for example tkinter. This is an example of a free software - nom proprietary - where I couldn't get it to do what I wish.
True, one may find loads of Python libraries, but what I dislike - that's me - about free software is that most of the time they are poorly documented, you find lot's of blogs posts that are not dated , no way to find the age of the post, so most of them are outdated. I will give you a simple example. I wanted to create a dev environment to create my Web site using Joomla that I would then move to my site host. In the past I have setup LAMP on the Raspbery Pi with success. But this time I could not succeed. I searched on the Net what was going on, found many answers that didn't help. Finally I created a Debian VM and succeeded. The time I lost trying to install LAMP on the Pi could not be recovered.
Talking about Python, true it's a very interesting language, but IMHO it has a serious drawback: it's interpreted. That means some bugs can't be found until you run it.
Now Proprietary languages Why are they so bad to you ? Yes you have to pay, but there are advantages. I will talk about Xojo, a product that I love and read about. Did you know that on top of the compiled language it brings a script language ? Very useful. I suggest you watch presentations form past Developer conferences. You will learn many things. For example Leading Point of Sale (POS) & Commerce Platform | Lightspeed has some of their developers doing presentations. This one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0znle9s5Jo&feature=youtu.be is quite impressive.
You can do use Python with Xojo, there is a plug-on for that. If you are interested, I will PM you with some links.
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(Replied via PM.)
I agree and by building on FMS you also have backups and you have the global fields working for multi user environment
I don't build anything for clients unless they're willing to shell out for a 5xUser pack, which obviously includes a server element. I stick everything on fmphost.com, and give them their own login so they can manage their account themselves, and have insulation in case I get hit by a bus etc.
Currently I seem to have one set of licenses from my FDS subscription, another license for my FBA subscription, and I have my own 5x User pack for company use, but I'm starting to think I don't really need the latter any more, as I work on my own.
Filemaker pricing has historically struck me as very high, but I've accepted now that unless I want to learn a new platform/language, and provide support for that technology going forward, that's just the way it is. Some clients absolutely baulk at the price; some fine it reasonable, it all depends on their budgets and their expectations, not to mention how much value there is in the solution that's being delivered. If they have a custom solution which saves them 4 hours per week for 2 people, that's
£20/hr * 2 * 5 * 48 working weeks = £9,600 - so most solutions tend to be cost effective, even at the smaller end of things, but as always, your mileage may vary.
As a final note - I don't really have anything for testing at home, I build pretty much everything directly in the cloud so I can get a feel for performance as I'm building.