NEW SW Subscription Policy - Effective October 2008

Hello,

I just read a notice from my VAR with respect to the changes in SW
Subscription Fees.

Its called a tiered timeline pricing for late and reinstallation fees.

<snip>


Example

Licenses lapsed or never on support will face a larger penalty fee for
every
year they are off subscription - $850 for each year with no maximum
cap on
fees to reinstate

1st Year - 850 + subscription - no maximum caps
2nd Year - 1700 + Subscription
3rd Year - 2550 + Subscription
4th Year and On... - 850 per year + subscription - no maximum caps
Example: If a 2005 SolidWorks Office Professional if brought back on
support,
total cost is 3 years of backdating fees ($2550) and subscription
($1495)
- total $4045

<snip>

Looks like the idea of sitting on a release (like skipping 2008) is
going to cost users a fortune in the future.
Suspect SW (like any other CAD company) was finding subscription
revenues falling off as the product matured and people are finding the
"value-added" of subscription a hard sell to upper management.

What are other people's opinions?

Len

 

yea someone else brought this up earlier on in the year.. can't remember
who..

but it is still cheaper to skip a year if thats what you wanted to do..
either pay for 2 years of subscription (1495 * 2) or skip a year and
then get on subscription (850 + 1495)

all depends on if you want the latest and greatest from them.

 

If they are going to advertise "latest and greatest" and deliver, that
is one thing, but if they are going to deliver BetaWare through the
first 3 releases until mid-year, then it certainly is not "greatest".

 

My opinion is: this is obnoxious
SW must have taken a dent in their earnings over SW2008 ,and they should
have, however that was self inflicted
To turn around and compel users to buy, whatever the product quality, to
keep dividends up if offensive and arrogant.
I see a fundamental choice for my small business -either pay the yearly
upgrade (whether I choose to use it or not) or stop buying SW altogether.
The only reason I took up my VAR offer recently to resume subs was actually
they offered a good deal to do so.
If they followed this draconian dictum there is no way I would have paid
what they ask.
So I guess they would either have to be flexible and only penalise a
reasonable amount of $ and make a living or get 0$.
Zero $ is fine by me.

 

well, it could be worse.. they could just keep everything in house,
testing, reporting, etc, which would mean they would need to hire more
people, which would probably raise the price significantly. Or, with
every major release they could charge an extra fee for the upgrade.. Now
I can only speak about solidworks, and I haven't looked at any of the
other 3d modelers like it, so not sure how they handle upgrades/service
packs.

I guess it all depends on if you want to have the newest version or not.
if you can live with one version, and don't want to upgrade to the
next, then don't.

Just have to take into consideration, with adding of new features, new
code, the group of programers that are working on it can only test it so
much.. One reason why I like how they did the beta program this go around.

I got my 17 beta points, how many did you rack up? lol

 

SolidWorks upgrade costs are just the tip of the iceberg.

A user has at least the following extras once he upgrades & these can
cost far more than the SWks Upgrade costs (& I sometimes think SWks
bean counters do NOT think of this):

1. SolidWorks training: no small cost in hours, no matter how you
count them & their $s whether self-trained or in classes

2. 3rd Party Add-in costs

3. Upgrading prior projects and making sure they "work" or haven't
been messed up somehow (time consuming to say the least).

4. Integrating upgrades with suppliers (& those that don't want to
upgrade)

5. Falling back to a prior version when something "breaks" (defeating
the upgrade "effciencies").

6. Debugging time when things don't go right.

Screwing up a project because of an upgrade can make the upgrade price
trivial.

Bo

 

no matter how improved it gets, it will never do the job for you

 

IOW You can negotiate lesser fees, perhaps.
IF you are dealing with other SW users you will probably
get other SW parts ... and if they are from a release later
than anything you support , what then?
Then there's aways a risk that you get several releases
behind and miss a step ... which may prohibit parts
from old releases migrating forward (more than one release
at a time).
Keeping rather current is just a cost of doing business
and, with some luck, new features & support are of
benefit worth the cost to you in any case.

Naturally, if your product is just 2D paper, somebody
later can pay a lot more if/when changes are needed ...
or product is to be made based on 3D models ... as all
anybody has is (old ?) 2D paper.

 

Get a drafting board, pencils & a slide rule.

 

If you wait four years to resubscribe SW will have changed so much in
terms of user interface that you will probably find that it would pay to
evaluate the field.

If you are sitting on a well tuned SW system and don't expect much
growth in seat count there is still no incentive to re-up. In times of
stagnant growth such as we are in now we can't be always going for the
bells and whistles.

It seems to me if they want to keep loyal customers they should put out
the carrot before putting out the stick. The carrot would be discounting
subscriptions when there is more than one seat.

Here is the TOP subscription plan:

No.
Seats Price
1 $1,395
2 $2,511
3 $3,627
..
..
..
n n * $1,395 - (n - 1) * .2 * $1,395

In other words knock of 20 percent of subscription for each seat over one.

In like manner knock off 5 percent for each year you stay on
subscription over two years.

From a return on investment point of view someone with 100 seats is
just not going to get the ROI that someone with a single seat is going
to get with the current system. This would level the playing field a bit.

TOP

 

And does the short period over which they held Beta give any warm
fuzzies about 2009?

SW has final figured out they should focus more on keeping old
customers. They used to do it by having VARs that called on customers at
other times than renewal time and who could "niche" into their area. As
soon as SW let multiple VARs cover the same area they shot themselves in
the foot as far as customer satisfaction because of the predatory nature
of the big VARs. I have two mega VARs and an ordinary VAR in my area.

And this is a sign of financial concerns within SW. Just hope they don't
cut quality again.

TOP

 

The best plan of course would be for SW to get their act together and
impress everyone with the 'product' so that they have willing buyers.
Then there is no need to lever peoples wallets open

In the new scenario you are probably remain not only pissed off with out of
the box quality, VAR performance or whatever riles you most, but now
resentful of the extortionate subs policy as well

Well done SW!

 

As much as I like to read and talk about "new tech", I want my stable
productivity tools to be just exactly that. Keeping the OS stable is
one major reason Apple can build a successful series of products.

We can talk of all sorts of "things" like Windows, add-ins, VARs, new
features, Beta testing, & more, but STABILITY still tops them all for
a production tool, which dramatically affects time spent on an
engineering project. That is why the 4 Seasons Hotel still has
Windows 2000 running at their front desks. The 4 Seasons simply can't
upgrade willy nilly and suffer downtime.

It is up to SolidWorks to fix their system so that their users have
99.9% uptime.

Bo