Horse Council British Columbia is a large not-for-profit organization with over 20,000 members. A long time ago they paid an experienced database developer $20,000 to create a customized membership management database application written on top of a well-known file-sharing database system. Unfortunately the amount of data the system was required to manage, combined with the number of concurrent users left them with a corrupt database within the first month of operation. Despite an initial effort from the developer to make the solution stable, he soon pointed the finger at the office staff and somehow blamed them for the problems.

Not about to make the same mistake twice, HCBC set out to spec and quote a real database system. Working with the largest two database vendors in the market they worked through a needs assessment with each of them in order to produce an accurate quote. This is when the gap in the market place became apparent: Both of the quotes came in at over $1,000,000.

The incentive to build Moxie was born from this experience and we have helped many other organizations along the way. Twelve years and three major versions later the Platform was released to the general public so that other developers and organizations may benefit from it as well.

During these years, a related organization trying to implement a similar system with a price tag of only $250,000 failed entirely, writing off the entire amount as the project could not be completed with such limited resources. A national organization in another country has since succeeded in building such a system, spending approximately $1,000,000 on development; but now has the ongoing expense of staffing approximately 10 fulltime developers and database administrators.

To now put the above numbers into perspective, the yearly cost of ongoing development and support of the HCBC system running on Moxie is approximately $12,000 per year.