Here’s where our internal pricing discussion went:
Vectric Aspire is in the $2000 range plus $400 per update which is every year or two. We’d like to get close to Aspire in terms of features but realistically, that will take some time.
For now we’d like to target a “price” of around $750 for Carbide Create Pro, or about a third of Aspire. We do not like the versioned releases with costs to update (V1, V2, V3…) so a subscription works better for us.
Based on almost everything we’ve seen other companies do when they switch to a subscription model, the annual cost of a subscription is about a third of the single-license cost, which would put Carbide Create Pro in the $250 per year range if it’s $750 to start with.
At $250 per year, it’s the cheapest thing out there for this kind of 3d relief modeling. (Aspire, Enroute, Carveco/Artcam, Type3). For our professional user base (the for-profit group) this price shouldn’t be a big deal but it could be significant for a home user.
We decided that $120 / year is where we’d like to be. Again, it’s cheaper than anything else out there and you’d have to pay for 6 years before it’s “break even” with the single license cost alone.
Based on this thread we came up with an addition to the subscription model, which turned out to be close to the Jet Brains model:
Buy a license for $360 and you’ll get one year of updates. You can continue to use the last version available during your update period forever. If you want to continue getting updates, it’s $120 per year.
So you’d have two options, a subscription at $120 per year or a permanent license at $360 + an optional $120/yr.
Finally, it’ll probably be free-to-use for a while as we get the feature set worked out so there’s plenty of time to decide if it’s right for you.
Thoughts?