Is there a limited, cheaper version of SAS?

[n6]

I'm a longtime SAS user and I'm going to retire in about five  years.  I have SAS through my job and I'm allowed to use it for personal use.  I don't use it much for personal use, but I do use it some for things and I like it a lot.  But I don't use SAS's extensive capabilities.  I just use the datastep, maybe procs freq, means, print, and simple stuff like that.

When I retire, my SAS is going to go away.  I can live without proc mixed and all that stuff since I'll no longer be doing serious statistical analyses by then, but I sure am going to miss the datastep and those other things to do small daily projects that I like to do.  I'd sure like it if someone told me there was a real stripped down version of SAS I could buy for maybe $100-200 per year.  Because otherwise I'd have to pay thousands of dollars per year for full SAS and then not use 99.9% of it, and I'm not going to do that.  But from my research I'm guessing you'll say, sorry, there is no stripped down version of SAS that costs way less than full SAS.

If that's the case, any suggestions on what I can use instead?  I know R a little and I like SAS way better.  I find R a little annoying.  But I guess I'll just break down and learn it better and use it some in retirement since my only alternative seems to be using nothing at all.

Thanks for reading.  Any thoughts or info is appreciated.

[SASKiwi]

You can't get cheaper than free. SODA is free for non-commercial / learning activities.

[Patrick]

There is SAS OnDemand for Academics for Independent Learners that gives you access to SAS 9.4

There is unfortunately no such free offering for Independent Learners for a SAS Viya version. ...I really hope that SAS will at some point reconsider and recognise the importance of having as many senior people as possible with Viya/CAS hands-on experience in their user base. This would for example enable migration projects to be quicker, more cost-effective, and carry less risk.

[Ksharp]

Agree!

[Atabarezz]

SAS had the perfect ingredients to dominate the no-code/low-code wave:

• SAS Enterprise Guide (drag-and-drop before it was cool)

• SAS Flow Modeling (a decade before KNIME became mainstream)

• SAS Studio (web-based interface)

• Visual Analytics (one-click dashboards & exploration)

Yet all of it stayed locked behind:

• heavy client/server deployments

• metadata servers

• mid-tier layers

• expensive licensing

• impossible home setup

Imagine a $15/mo SaaS SAS Studio:

• runs locally or in cloud

• drag-and-drop modeling

• runs SAS + Python seamlessly

• KNIME-like extensibility

• Visual Analytics lite

• community packages & marketplace

This was obvious. They had the tech years before competitors.

They could have owned the no-code data science market they actually invented.

But instead… Alteryx, KNIME, Power BI, Dataiku, RapidMiner, Databricks notebooks, and even Excel absorbed SAS’s youth.