Eagle Professional, Group or Pooling together license

[Dago]

Someone needs to come along and provide serious competition for Eagle. That way we will either end up with a battery, cheaper package to switch to or it will force Eagle to reduce prices.

The competition is called kicad. If you have a burning need to spend money then diptrace

[Kjelt]

Depends entirely upon the board you are doing.
Try doing a simple single sided board with a few LEDs on it, but is 161mm long, you need to pay $1145 to do that in Eagle.

In theory you're absolutely right, in practice there is so much you can do to get where you want to go. Remember this is for hobbieists, so I have no problem sticking two pcb's on a carrierpcb for instance and solder a few shared wires. But yeah if you really need a pcb >160mm you're stuck.

My whole point was that I really like the pricing system. They sell the hobbyist version which is the same as the standard version for $140 instead of $690 that is just over 20% from the original price. A huge 80% discount! 
If Arm/Keil or IAR with their Arm dev tools would do that I would buy it this afternoon. But those companies give only max. 40% discount (no commercial usage and no support and 1 year updates only) on packages costing over 2,5k$ so no way a hobbyist will do that (at least not the hobbyist with a normal dayjob).

So you are using Altium designer right? What does that cost for a hobbyist if I may ask, how much % discount do you get for a non commercial version and what are it's restrictions?