Confusion on Altium Designer pricing

[mrtn]

I bought an academic license because I work at an educational institution. It was about USD 500 for the version that will disable itself entirely a year from now (outstanding)

Some day I will no longer be working at this educational institution and I would like to possibly continue using Altium Designer. I have heard the $9k figure and around $1750 for subscription. Does this mean I have to pay $9k regardless? Or can I go the subscription route and pay $1750 a year? The latter would be possible. $9k might as well be $90k. I think I know the answer.

I do independent consulting but $9k is half of my yearly income from my moonlighting career.

Much thanks.

[8086]

You can get the educational licence while not being in education?

Huh. Never knew that.

[mrtn]

You seem to have missed the first sentence of what I wrote.

[8086]

You said you work there, not that you study there...

[sacherjj]

Altium Pricing is a fixed price, plus first year of maintenance.  Then each year, you can choose to continue paying maintenance.  Many software packages are going to this.  Making it cheaper to keep you paying support, than just buying it every couple years.

[mrtn]

My role is in education and research and my use of Altium is supporting such activities. I don't suppose they would allow a person with any random educational link to get the educational license.

[mrtn]

Altium Pricing is a fixed price, plus first year of maintenance.  Then each year, you can choose to continue paying maintenance.  Many software packages are going to this.  Making it cheaper to keep you paying support, than just buying it every couple years.

I suppose if I could mentally amortize the cost over several years then it would be a reasonable proposition. Though I am a strong supporter of Dave's lower-cost Altium ideas (as long as it doesn't suck.)

[EEVblog]

You have to pay the $9K at first, and then either chose to pay nothing more and never get any update (even bug fixes last I checked), that's called a "perpetual license". Or you pay an additional few $K each year for a "subscription" that keeps you updated with whatever they release in that time.
Altium coped a lot of flack at one point for not releasing anything in the year people paid subscription, so their money was wasted.
Also, without paying subscription you don't get access to libraries now, but I could be wrong about that?
Also, if you start subscription and then stop, and then want to take it up again in order to get some new release you like, you have to pay a big penalty, or the full amount again. They do everything they can to lock you into a subscription.

It's funny, I can remember Nick Martin standing up in the front of the entire company when they slashed the price by 70% or something ($12K down to $3K?) and said "We are burning our bridges, there is no way we can go back to high priced software". Now they are just creeping back up and up again 

[mrtn]

you have to pay a big penalty, or the full amount again. They do everything they can to lock you into a subscription.

Yeah I can't disagree. I guess there's not much else to say that hasn't been said. The numbers won't make sense for me. 

Thanks.

[Mechatrommer]

Altium Pricing is a fixed price, plus first year of maintenance.  Then each year, you can choose to continue paying maintenance.  Many software packages are going to this.  Making it cheaper to keep you paying support, than just buying it every couple years.

let say (with round off figures) i buy $9K AD13 today and pay $1K yearly maintenance after that. say 5 years from now, AD14 comes out. can i use my AD13 license to activate AD14, ie i dont have to pay $9K again for AD14?

[Selectech]

Nick Martin got the boot so the new suits just do what they can to enlarge their bonuses. They don't really care about the users.

[Kjelt]

$9k instead of $500 
I would start looking for any university in this world where you can become a student for <$1k administrative fee a year, that must not be so hard to find in these economic troublesome times in some poorer countries.
Or sponsor a real EE student if he orders/buys it for you, knowing students they won't mind for an extra couple of hundred $, must be hundreds of volunteers 

[AndyC_772]

Have you looked into Cadence instead? I pay a fraction of that for Orcad PCB Designer.

[sacherjj]

Altium Pricing is a fixed price, plus first year of maintenance.  Then each year, you can choose to continue paying maintenance.  Many software packages are going to this.  Making it cheaper to keep you paying support, than just buying it every couple years.

let say (with round off figures) i buy $9K AD13 today and pay $1K yearly maintenance after that. say 5 years from now, AD14 comes out. can i use my AD13 license to activate AD14, ie i dont have to pay $9K again for AD14?

If you pay the $9 and continue to pay $1750 or whatever it is, then you keep getting upgrades and updates.  The issue with not doing that is you may run into a bug on a feature that you didn't use before and you might have to roll backwards until it works, if you don't have support.

But if you pay $9k today, you get AD14.  It had been out for months.

[Mechatrommer]

But if you pay $9k today, you get AD14.  It had been out for months.

ok, maybe its my bad example, let me ask again... if i pay $9K today and get perpetual license for AD14. and i become a good boy in the future to pay $1790 yearly, not a single month i miss, i patch updates and all etc.... and then 10 years from now AD15 will be out. the 10mil question is.... do i have to pay $9K again (or whatever the market value is during that time) for AD15 perpetual license? to be able to patch update for AD15? i hope that clear.

[sacherjj]

But if you pay $9k today, you get AD14.  It had been out for months.

ok, maybe its my bad example, let me ask again... if i pay $9K today and get perpetual license for AD14. and i become a good boy in the future to pay $1790 yearly, not a single month i miss, i patch updates and all etc.... and then 10 years from now AD15 will be out. the 10mil question is.... do i have to pay $9K again (or whatever the market value is during that time) for AD15 perpetual license? to be able to patch update for AD15? i hope that clear.

Yes, the perpetual support entitles you to all future updates.  Both minor and major versions.  It is a subscription for the software.  If you choose to not continue paying the subscription, you have a perpetual license for everything up till the latest that was available when your subscription ended.

[Mechatrommer]

ok thanks. as i understand it, i only pay $9K once for ad14,15,16,20 and beyond so long i pay continuous yearly subscription fee.

[sacherjj]

ok thanks. as i understand it, i only pay $9K once for ad14,15,16,20 and beyond so long i pay continuous yearly subscription fee.

Correct.  And part of the $9k is the first year subscription.

[EEVblog]

Nick Martin got the boot so the new suits just do what they can to enlarge their bonuses. They don't really care about the users.

To be fair, Nick Martin never cared about the users real needs either  he was the industry master in telling you what you needed...  and that was why the company got such a bad rep over the last decade or more.
The new management is more focussed on the user and their actual real world needs, hence the focus on "core" product again, they have been quite open about this.
The increasing pricing of the product is another separate issue.

[corax]

Also, without paying subscription you don't get access to libraries now, but I could be wrong about that?

I thought that was the idea too, but we let our subscriptions lapse back in December, and I can still access/download all of the component/footprint/etc. content in their vault.
Not getting updates though, and not allowed back into the bug tracking area of their live.altium.com website until the subscription is made current.

[miguelvp]

My role is in education and research and my use of Altium is supporting such activities. I don't suppose they would allow a person with any random educational link to get the educational license.

Educational prices used to be available to not only students but also (reads: specially) to staff and faculty. Meaning you could be the janitor and still qualify AFAIK.

When I used to work as staff at UNI doing research (many moons ago when I was an IEEE and SPIE member as well) educational prices were available for all staff, faculty and students. Actually I was also part of the software purchasing committee. I don't recall how much we paid for allegro (Cadence) if anything, could have been free at the time, for example the cost per seat for a student for all the M$ software was only $10. I believe Cadence still have an educational track for only for qualified Universities. We used Allegro to develop a 3GHz capable token ring fiber optic network for medical imaging with in house build hardware and software back in 93. I do believe we used a VMEBus and a 68000 based system, not sure if we were using OS9 or lynxOS but some kind of real time OS, it's 20 years ago so I don't really remember.

Allegro as far as I know, is still the leader if you want to do anything in the GHz arena. At least on the higher bandwidth part of things.

I miss being able to buy cheap software/hardware, I miss spring time with sun dresses all around, but I was single then, not anymore, but I really don't miss the measly paycheck

I do recall one day someone walking with a bunch of tubes filled with dual ported 4ns VRAM (64MB worth of it) asking, "guess what I'm holding in here?" His answer was "a Ferrari Testarossa" and we got it for free from a research project for Toshiba IIRC. We got major breaks on pricing for hardware as well. They pretty much threw equipment, software and grants our way to persuade students to use their tech. I would think that's still the case but i'm not sure.

I do miss academia, flexible hours, free education, awesome hardware, cheap software and cool projects, long vacations, University research provides a fraction of overhead compared to the private industry and vendors keep on pushing their hardware/software for peanuts. Only reason I left, the private industry paid triple. Having been published helped a lot on jumping from academia to the "real" world.

But if you are still in academia, take advantage of the cheap software, heck take advantage of the free credits you can get while being paid for doing so.

Sad thing is that US Universities were a great way to retain all the talent from all around the world within the US, now they pretty much encourage them to get back to their original countries. 

I'll dare to say that Universities are the best assets for any country, if you can keep them after they graduate.

[Kjelt]

Sad thing is that US Universities were a great way to retain all the talent from all around the world within the US, now they pretty much encourage them to get back to their original countries. 
I'll dare to say that Universities are the best assets for any country, if you can keep them after they graduate.

The same is going on here but the saddest thing (i think personally) is that our countries can not find the right PhD students from our midst but that after they graduate their masters (or some unfortunately even before that) they start working in the industry. Getting knowledge immigrants might be a short term answer but not a long term one unless they can stay and integrate 100%.

But even then as mentioned in an other topic, the newly hired foreigners are lowering the overall salaries because there is more supply.
[start rant]
Personally I think the best thing for a country is that excellent engineers are paid more then their average managers and that society seeing them driving fancy cars and having a luxury live might finally bring more students for the technical education. At this moment in our country (and I exaggerate a little bit not much) students can choose a technical study which takes more then 5 years while it should be done in 4 (but the level is so high only 10% makes it in 4 years or so) and then get paid half of when they study for a MBA like study and finish that without problems in 4 years. Then a boatload of high tech industries are still so backward organised that the only way a top-engineer can make a carreer is switching into a technical projectleader or even worse a manager. What the &^*&^ does a country need with a ton of managers? I say long live holacracy [end of rant] 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

[facumedica]

Here there's something called ThePirateBay  Sometimes It's the only way to go when you are a student 

[DerekG]

Educational prices used to be available to not only students but also (reads: specially) to staff and faculty. Meaning you could be the janitor and still qualify AFAIK.

The educational license allows use for "educational & training purposes within the university". It does not allow use for commercial purposes outside of the university.

You need an educational email address to receive the license code each year.

[miguelvp]

Educational prices used to be available to not only students but also (reads: specially) to staff and faculty. Meaning you could be the janitor and still qualify AFAIK.

The educational license allows use for "educational & training purposes within the university". It does not allow use for commercial purposes outside of the university.

You need an educational email address to receive the license code each year.

You are 100% correct, I should have stipulated that. Surely if your use is commercial you can pony up the full license so they won't take it from you ten fold for missuse of a license.