Often it's simply due to workload and they simply let it go dormant, and yes, sometimes it's because they've decided that we weren't for them.
I decided not to renew my subscription because I have lost trust in Altium.
When we were a small startup, we purchased two seats and subscription.. It was version 13 time. We had endless trouble with bugs. ALtium blamed our hardware, so we went out and bought new PC's that were exactly to spec. Yet the bugs remained. I remember nearly have a crash every few hours, and it just made it impossible. Given that we had spent so much of our money, we had no option to continue.. After numerous attempts at getting things resovled and after some 12 months we were at the end of our 'subscription' and thing had not improved. I had some bad experiences with Altiums support people and had they been my people, they would have been called in for a serious talk. Your sales engineer kept pestering me and eventually Altium did the right thing and gave us a new subscription for free, in recognition of the problems we had ( although never admitted that there was a problem ).
We upgraded and got to version 17, and it does 99% of what I must have. It does not do all i'd Like to do, but i can work around that. I evaluated version 18, and i was just terribly disapointed, that it was once again full of bugs, and i was not going to move to that from what was finally a mostly stable bit of software. When i look at bug crunch right now, I see that there is still many thousands of unresolved issues. So when it was time for sub renewal, i was back where i was intially.. asking what actually was the sub paying for? Being able to upgrade to buggy software, when i had something that mostly worked for us. I have not looked at v19, I'm told its better by some my industry peers, but none are giving me 'rave' reviews, and several i know have also just stayed at v17 and are getting on with it.
The issue i have is that i'm asked to pay quite substainial fees for 'subscription' but in the main, I dont' see how i can trust Altium to provide the service it said it was going to do, which was to fix problems.
i'd need some pretty compelling reason, and a lot of reassurance to renew a subscription and there is no way that i think that i shoudl have to pay for the time that V18 was an option, given its large number of bugs.
Once on subscription (or back on as it were), we assume the onus to deliver value greater than the dollars you've invested. Again, fortunately, the vast majority of our subscribers do renew with us. As and for the consistency of releases, many years ago we had an admittedly lackluster record.
V13,14,15 were buggy, 13 was nearly unusable.
16 and 17 were acceptable.
18 was ( to all accounts, but not my experinence ) not really usable.
19 Is not getting rave reviews, but has supposabley fixed some things.
You are right, its been very lackluster, and you burned my trust ( and others )
However, this has not been the case for many years now, and we consistently release robust new versions on time year after year.
Version 18 was not that long ago?
We strive to strike a balance between revolutionary new features, requested must-have feature requests, and yes, bug fixes.
Had Altium just fixed the bugs, you woudl still have me as a subscriber, but one who probably had a neutral view on it. Adding some new features would give you the opportunity to convert me into a raving customer who loves you.. But because ( in my expereince ) bugs never got fixed and i suffered lots of crashes, well, I dont' think that you do fix bugs, and you have lost my trust.
I'm really glad that you have decided to post on the forum though. That is a good thing.
Doing a proper evaluation of something like AD is not something that you can do in a few hours. You really have to do quite a bit of work in it, and thats time i cna't get back. I'd like to be able to submit a PO for a subscription, but i need to be able to justify it to my team, and right now, I can't.