I have always been provided SAS as part of my job, so I never really realized how much it cost. I’ve bought Stata before, and of course R :). I recently found out how much a reasonable bundle of SAS modules along with base SAS costs per year per seat, at least under the GSA. I tried finding out how much IBM SPSS is for a comparable bundle, but their web page was “not available”.
One of the disappointing problems in SAS (as I need PROC MIXED for some analysis) is to recode categorical variables to have a particular reference category. In R, my usual tool, this is rather easy both to set and to modify using the relevel command available in base R (in the stats package). My understanding is that this is actually easy in SAS for GLM, PHREG and some others, but not in PROC MIXED.