I would suggest Altium has two main check points for whether this move to a lower entry cost will be successful. These are in addition to Dave's mention of a free starter edition.
The first hurdle will be what the price ladder will look like, once we move above the free starter edition. I have noticed many companies making this ladder
way too steep. What this may mean to a one man start-up, is that to actually create a competitive design, he may end up needing the 'full' multi-kilobucks edition of the software.
We may debate exactly what these limits could be, but if the free+low cost versions of Altium only allows even experienced designers to make 'toy' boards, then Altium may as well not bother. One thing to keep in mind here, which was mentioned previously, is board size. For various reasons many start-ups cannot or will not use the smallest packages and components, thus equal designs may require different board sizes, depending on the size of the company behind them. Small, one man start-up => more likely to need more board area for a given design.
Similarly, the number of signal layers. If I cannot have at least 4 layers, and have the ability to knock holes in my ground and power layers, the latter in order to reduce parasitic capacitance on parts of a board, then this will put a serious limit to modern, mixed signal designs. More so again, if we consider the start-up is more likely to use older (Ie. larger) types of SMDs.
The second hurdle Altium has to pass, is
no subscriptions! I genuinely hope free_electron is wrong about this one, as that will be a deal breaker to many people. The same reason this sounds great to the accounting department is the same reason why it is poison to hobbyists and small start-ups: The recurring costs, and the strings attached.
To a small company the idea that you have to pay 'rent' for critical parts of your tool chain will be very hard to swallow. By definition a start-up will have little idea about what next year will bring. If they have rented many of their tools, then it will be much harder to scale operations back for a while, if there is a quiet period. This is an all-or-nothing situation: You cannot promise just a hair of support and upgrades to last year's customers, if it takes X times average annual fee per software package in your tool chain to keep operations running. On the other hand if you have time unlimited access to the software, then you can just scale back as needed, do your old daytime job function for a while, and be ready to jump back into action at a moment's notice with no fees attached.
Secondly, the subscription model implies a requirement for a program package to 'call home' at regular intervals, and probably even to be online while using the program (for 'cloud access', of course...
). Otherwise there would be no way of enforcing a time limit.
However, the hobbyist and the small start-up are both likely to be using very economical DSL network connections, intended for domestic applications. No enterprise level network with enterprise level support. So having local network outages taking out your tool chain is a very real - and completely unnecessary - risk to accept. You will literally be one errand tree root from shutting down all your 'rented' software packages.
As for Adobe moving to a
rental cloud service model: Seems the financial analysts doesn't believe too strongly in this one, long term, once people realize what being a rental customer actually entails.