25k is actually pretty cheap for this sort of numerical work. That's also licensing about a quarter of the entire library, regardless of how much your actually using.

To put that in context, 25k is roughly the fully loaded cost of a developer month, if they can do this sort of work properly.

Plenty of specialized libraries out there will cost you twice (or more) as much to acquire and a % on your shipped product.

Thinking of this as expensive is either naive, or just the wrong tool for the job.

For the application we were considering and the algorithms we liked from CGAL, exact computation wasn't really an issue. I agree 25K is peanuts if the choice is between developing yourself from scratch or licensing something from CGAL. But in our case the choice was between CGAL, using a simpler and possibly less advanced/less accurate solution, or using an alternative LGPL package. Especially considering the many dependencies most CGAL packages have on other packages, the value proposition for just using a small part of the library for a single algorithm quickly becomes a hard sell...

> For the application we were considering and the algorithms we liked from CGAL, exact computation wasn't really an issue.

So it sounds more like you weren't trying to buy the right tool for the job.