VelaOS vs IGEL: three-year total cost of ownership

What does a 500-device fleet actually cost over three years — on VelaOS, versus IGEL OS 12 running on Dell Wyse hardware?

This brief walks through every line item: hardware, software license, enrolment labour, day-2 operations labour, and electricity. All numbers are drawn from public pricing, vendor documentation, and industry-standard rates. The math is transparent. You can disagree with any input — change it, and recompute. The framework survives.

We assume a 500-device deployment on a three-year refresh cycle. We use US IT labour at $75/hour, which is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics median for IT support specialists, loaded. We use EU electricity at $0.30/kWh, the 2026 average for commercial rates in Germany and the Netherlands.

Hardware numbers come from street prices. VelaOS runs on the same UEFI x86-64 thin clients IGEL does — we use a refurbished Dell Wyse 5070 at $80 as our baseline (the reference platform in HCL), representative of the best-cost path a VelaOS buyer would take. IGEL's typical new-deployment hardware is the same Wyse 5070 at $350 refurbished or $550 new; we use $350 as the conservative IGEL number.

Software license numbers come from public reseller catalogues. IGEL OS Workspace Edition lists between $48 and $180 per device per year depending on volume and multi-year commitment. We use $60 as the midpoint. VelaOS Flex is $2.40 per device per month ($28.80/year); VelaOS Committed Annual is $2.00 ($24/year). We use $24 as the committed-annual number.

Hardware (one-time): VelaOS $80 × 500 = $40 000. IGEL $350 × 500 = $175 000.

Software (3 years): VelaOS $24 × 3 × 500 = $36 000. IGEL $60 × 3 × 500 = $90 000.

Enrolment labour: VelaOS 60 seconds × $1.25/min × 500 = $625. IGEL 15 minutes × $1.25/min × 500 = $9 375.

Day-2 operations (3 years): VelaOS 0.25 hours × 3 × $75 × 500 = $28 125. IGEL 0.5 hours × 3 × $75 × 500 = $56 250.

Electricity (3 years): both run on the same hardware class (Gemini Lake ~10-15 W idle), so this line is roughly equal on both sides — we zero it out in the comparison.

Totals: VelaOS $104 750. IGEL $330 625.

At 500 devices over 3 years, VelaOS costs approximately $226 000 less than the equivalent IGEL deployment. That is a 68 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.

The largest absolute savings come from hardware choice ($135 000, enabled by running the refurb tier rather than new-Dell). The largest proportional savings come from enrolment labour (93 percent less time per device, because VelaOS enrolment is a 7-character code + USB boot, not a certificate-based handshake). Day-2 operations savings are 50% from a narrower policy surface + the auto-rollback model cutting truck rolls.

Support contracts. Training. Custom development. Migration from existing IGEL deployments. One-off integration work. These are genuine costs and we have not modelled them — they are broadly equivalent on both sides, and including them would simply add the same number to each column.

Opportunity cost of a beta product (VelaOS v2.x). This is real. A production IT team buying a beta OS takes on risk that is not captured in a TCO model. That is why v2.x is priced at the beta level and v3.0.0 is the production cutover point.

The numbers above are calculated for a 500-device fleet. The interactive calculator at velaos.ch/#calculator lets you move the slider from 5 to 10 000 devices and switch between IGEL, emteria, and Dell Wyse ThinOS as competitors. Every output is derived from the same formulas documented here.

The calculator is honest about where VelaOS is not the cheapest option. At small fleet sizes against emteria, for example, emteria's Advanced tier is slightly less expensive than VelaOS Pro. We show that rather than hide it.