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Lower Subscription Cost


jcaia

Question

I love the subscription software model if the costs are reasonable.  Adobe offers their entire software package for $50-60 for $3-5k worth of software.  Autodesk has a host of subscription packages from $30-235 a month but in the $200-ish a month you get several top-self titles and other web-based modeling apps that broken out would have cost around $10k+.  If you added up the pre-subscription rate for purchasing the Autodesk package vs the VW Designer the value of the Autodesk subscription outweighs the VW package by a 2-3x margin.

 

In relation to those software companies VW has priced itself WAY high in my opinion based upon the idea of getting (basically) a single software package with "modules".   Even if it meant signing onto a subscription for a min. of 12-24 months, I think Nemetschek would benefit by lower subscription costs through added users.

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Guest LindadR

@jcaia thanks for your feedback! We aimed to price our subscription offering very competitively to products like AutoCAD and Revit, which customers tell us they often evaluate before deciding to purchase Vectorworks. Vectorworks Architect is comparable to Revit and can be purchased for $153/month in the US, compared to Revit’s $290/month price tag. Vectorworks Fundamentals is often compared to AutoCAD and is priced at $108/month compared to AutoCAD at $200/month. In addition to being able to purchase our newly released Subscriptions (now available in the US, AU, and NZ), Vectorworks users still enjoy the flexibility of purchasing a perpetual license which will never expire and can always be kept up to date with a low cost maintenance plan – a money-saving convenience that many of our competitors are no longer offering to customers.

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@LindadR thank you for the reply.  If you look at what you get from Autodesk for $235 per month (see below) its 6 top tier software titles - like Revit, Autocad, 3Ds Max, etc etc plus a lot of nice web-based apps.  All that adds up to well over $10k worth of software....perhaps closer to $20k.

 

Revit alone is around $192 a month - but Revit was much more expensive product than Vectorworks ever was due to its market position.  My overall point is that if you took the purchase price of VW and compared that with the subscription rates of other companies/titles relative to what their purchase prices were, VW's ratio of subscription price to purchase price is skewed.

 

 

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On 7/4/2019 at 6:21 PM, jcaia said:

VW has priced itself WAY high

 

The sales model for everyone has evolved over the years . If you were to introduce a monthly subscription cost then anyone who spent on a perpetual licence is going to feel an immediate bump, because other users are getting on the bus for much much less.

On 7/8/2019 at 1:59 AM, Matt Overton said:

Monthly would be nice.

 

Monthly subs certainly makes it more affordable and Adobe proudly announced that the use of pirated software plummeted when they did this.

The Adobe CC suite is absolutely astonishing value when you are able to make use of 3 or more of their packages, so it's very easily justified. They've cemented thier market position forever as no competitor will ever get a look in now

 

16 hours ago, LindadR said:

Vectorworks Fundamentals is often compared to AutoCAD and is priced at $108/month compared to AutoCAD at $200/month

 

Pricing is important, but AutoCAD is already the "industry standard". I think one of VW strongest points is the sheer amount of import/export functions. It will play nicely with a lot of different softwares.

 

16 hours ago, LindadR said:

perpetual license which will never expire

 

Be careful with that! It's not so much a perpertual licence, but an end of life for maintainance and support, with financial penalty if you want to get back into the support cycle.

Sure you can use the softwareforever, but any critical fixes and patches are never rolled out to you beyond two versions. There's lots of people on legacy versions of VW, but they're still running with bugs which are fixed for other people, but not for them. Just think of those poor folk who have a perpertual licence for 2013, and now because their OS has updated, they can no longer use this perpetual licence.... Perpetual, is not perpetual... Perpetual is, "you're on your own from here, kid" maybe a year, maybe two, but not perpetuity.

I don't know of any other software firm which leaves legacy versions with critical issues still unpatched.

 

The answer is not impossible to find.

The intial lump sum has been paid by every VW user so dumping this in favour of a subscription will annoy the existing customer base. Instead give them a heavily discounted rate back to what VSS costs. (for me it's £550 a year, or hopefully, £50pcm soon)

 

For those who don't want the initial outlay, raise their subscription to say £750/year, or £75pcm) for a true perpetual Software-As-A-Service Model. (OS updates won't break you!)

 

And finally, for those who want the benefits of the first package, but cant afford the out-lay, how about £1k or £100/pcm, until they've paid their "Perpetual" lump sum, and then it drops to half.

This will help grow the user-base, encourage long term use..... but crucially, from a development and support perspective, everyone will be on the latest version anyway. Completely removing the unsupported legacy version argument.... And, it'll heavily reduce piracy as well.

 

As a final comment, one thing I'd love to see that no-one offers at the moment is a pay-per-view model.

I would love to see all these photoshop/autocad subscription models offer a 5-day, pay as you go model. Some users don't want to sign in for a year. Just pay when they use it once in a blue moon. Would happily pay £10 for a week of photoshop, when I have a job to price it into, or £20 for one week of 3DS max, when I know I won't use it for 45 weeks of the year. It means I can build the software cost into the individual job, if needed.

 

As ever, I'd love to read other user's thoughts about this.

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