Altium possibly charging for cloud storage space?

[Engineer1]

I've just read a Reddit thread where multiple users report being contacted by Altium reps, with a heads up that they will be charging for use of 365 cloud space, at what appears to be thousands of dollars per year (on top of subscription cost) for 10GB space.

I don't know if I can post a link here. But checking the Altium subreddit will find it. It's a pretty active topic.

Coincidentally I am about to start a small project on Kicad, as maybe it does what I need. I do love Altium though. Particularly the schematic editor.

[ajb]

I don't know of any rule against posting links here.  I assume this is the thread you're referring to? https://www.reddit.com/r/Altium/comments/1gn78xx/altium_is_going_to_start_charging_altium365_users/

This was mentioned here by another user: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/massive-price-hike-on-a365-coming-in-jan/

None of this is really that surprising when you look at their overall pattern of behavior for the last few years...or just read the bio of their "General Manager of Digital Software"...or read any of their investor communications. 

Gérard Métrailler is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Software at Altium and leads the high-performance go-to-market and product organizations of Altium's software portfolio, including Altium Designer. He drives the product R&D, sales, and marketing strategies and teams. Gérard works closely with the Chief Commercial Officer, Marc Boonen, to accelerate the Enterprise Sales growth.

Gérard has been a leader in SaaS and software industries and possesses extensive P&L, global go-to-market, product, and portfolio strategy expertise. He has a proven track record of delivering growth, profitability, and value creation while focusing on strategic clarity, organizational transformation, and operational excellence.

Before Altium, Gérard was Executive Vice President of Global Products at Corel Corporation (now Alludo) and led the company from a perpetual licensing model to a SaaS subscription offering that combines cloud, AI, mobile, and desktop. He was vital in transforming Corel Corporation from a packaged software company into a recurring-revenue industry leader through organic growth and M&A.

This is the business plan du jour: convince customers that they need your subscription services, get them good and locked in, then start jacking up the price.  Yeah, you destroy all of that hard won customer trust, but who cares as long as the line goes up.  Maybe you even tank the business, but that's fine too -- just take your big pile of capital gains and your "strategic clarity" to some other unsuspecting company and you can do it all over again!

[nctnico]

Corel, now that is a name I have not heard for a long time... Didn't know they still existed.

[jc101]

What is impressive is they say you are using too much, but reportedly unable to give you a breakdown of how much space is in use and by what.

Altium have solved the issue for me. They won't take my money to keep my permanent license, hence A365 is off limits. They lose even more money.

[RnDMonkey]

A truly disgusting acceleration of enshittification happening at Altium. Been using it since 2008 and have become something of a guru. Sucks to see it going down the toilet, and quickly.

[thm_w]

Its fine to link the reddit thread.
There is some discussion in there that the large storage sizes are due to how commits are held, binary sch/pcb files. So you end up with a ton of binary commits which aren't easily compressed. I don't even know if the ASCII format is still available?

So then maybe they got their cloud bill which was huge and fought the issue with this instead of going back to ASCII or finding another solution.

A truly disgusting acceleration of enshittification happening at Altium. Been using it since 2008 and have become something of a guru. Sucks to see it going down the toilet, and quickly.

Its attempting to maximize profits, has nothing to do with shitification at all, we already have one forum member who overuses that word, please don't be another.

[ajb]

Its fine to link the reddit thread.
There is some discussion in there that the large storage sizes are due to how commits are held, binary sch/pcb files. So you end up with a ton of binary commits which aren't easily compressed. I don't even know if the ASCII format is still available?

Even plaintext files like .PrjPcb files are handled in ways that make them less efficient for version control.  Parameters, for example, will get rearranged in the file depending on how they were last accessed in the GUI, resulting in a lot of lines changing even if there has been no substantive change to the data.  There's lots of other stuff that seems to change for no obvious reason between commits.  Although that probably doesn't amount to anywhere near as much raw storage as the binary files do in a typical PCB project repo. 

I have a vague recollection that PCB version comparison used to be much more useful back before they added git support, I wonder if part of that change lost them the ability to do a proper diff between the binary PCB files?  Allowing for proper diffs that can be handled intelligently and atomically in something like an altium PCB file requires a data model and access methods that are designed with that purpose in mind, but, other than for compatibility with git et al, it doesn't have to be represented in plain text.  Arguably something custom could allow them to store project data/history more efficiently AND enable more sophisticated change review/comparison tools in the UI, versus using plaintext tools for binary files -- maybe they are doing that as well, I don't know.  But in any case, this appears to be a pretty dumb problem on Altium's part. 

[nctnico]

A truly disgusting acceleration of enshittification happening at Altium. Been using it since 2008 and have become something of a guru. Sucks to see it going down the toilet, and quickly.

Its attempting to maximize profits,

Emphasis mine (and cut some text).

I think that is the whole point. Perhaps milking a few very big customers is more lucrative compared to catering to a couple of hundred who may buy or may not buy a new perpetual license every 5 to 10 years. Maybe Altium is also seeing Kicad moving in closer and they decided to try and lock in as many customers into their cloud based solution and milk those instead of trying to fight a battle they can't win.

In the end Altium is a tool with a cost and benefit to a company who uses it. If the costs don't make up for the benefit, it is time to look for a different tool which is more suitable.

[tszaboo]

Its fine to link the reddit thread.
There is some discussion in there that the large storage sizes are due to how commits are held, binary sch/pcb files. So you end up with a ton of binary commits which aren't easily compressed. I don't even know if the ASCII format is still available?

So then maybe they got their cloud bill which was huge and fought the issue with this instead of going back to ASCII or finding another solution.

A truly disgusting acceleration of enshittification happening at Altium. Been using it since 2008 and have become something of a guru. Sucks to see it going down the toilet, and quickly.

Its attempting to maximize profits, has nothing to do with shitification at all, we already have one forum member who overuses that word, please don't be another.

I had Altium rep at our place asking:
Why are you not using our cloud?

It's completely upside down. I have a project, which has PCBs and other things in it. Not the other way around. So can I add a doc file to the project? Yes, but rather you wouldn't... Okay then.

And now they come with this. I seriously don't understand what these companies think, charging 100x more for things than the industry standard.

[Niklas]

I ignored a phone call from them last week after some not so positive emails the week before and got a new call this morning. They can still not provide any means for the user to check the actual usage of data storage, just partial data is available by downloading all projects locally and check their sizes. Upon asking how they will treat customers that refuse to pay the "Trust me bro" invoice for exceeding 10 GB was that they will not lock out our access to our data. When asking if I can get that in writing, the answer was not really clear and he had to check with his boss...

For my workplace it is not really a matter of money, even if a price increase sucks, it is more a matter of trust. Can we do business with them, or should we take our money and go somewhere else? At the moment we are actively looking at alternatives.

[Someone]

For my workplace it is not really a matter of money, even if a price increase sucks, it is more a matter of trust. Can we do business with them, or should we take our money and go somewhere else? At the moment we are actively looking at alternatives.

You can continue using Altium with some other GIT storage (cloud provider, or on premises).

Altium are under no incentive to help you with that but it works fine.

[Niklas]

Yes, I guess that is an option and we still have more than a year left on the licence. It would be possible for us to archive older projects in another storage space.
The issue is more of how things were presented by Altium and how it is perceived by the customer. They were presenting a lot of new add ons and features, then just mentioning some quotas as a side note. The data storage was also played down as "some", read few, customers put "everything" in the cloud and they wanted to address this. The day after this presentation, an email arrived with "you are exceeding the 10 GB and here is what you need to pay". No info then, and still no info after another call and a direct question, about what will happen if we are not paying.
It would have been fair of them to say that you could continue to use Altium as you do today, or pay a bit more if you want to use the added features. You would need to pay for Silicon Expert and the other plugins on top of Altium added price anyway.
Now it's more like pay, or else...

[tszaboo]

For my workplace it is not really a matter of money, even if a price increase sucks, it is more a matter of trust. Can we do business with them, or should we take our money and go somewhere else? At the moment we are actively looking at alternatives.

You can continue using Altium with some other GIT storage (cloud provider, or on premises).

Altium are under no incentive to help you with that but it works fine.

Or even better SVN. I had to justify continual usage of SVN for our repos. I gave up after 25 reasons.
Git is terrible with binary files, tries to diff them. Repos cannot be large, 1-3 GB and it falls apart. There are workarounds, but the easiest workaround is just not using git. Altium originally only supported SVN, they went with git to their online storage probably, which likely costing them processing power and HDD.

[asmi]

I use Synology's live backups for that, as it preserves old versions of the files and allows reverting to any date in the past it has data for. This works well for me as the backups occur automatically so I don't have to remember to commit/push. But I'm the only person working on my designs, so maybe this approach won't work as well for cases when multiple people work on the same designs. As a nice side effect, Synology NAS also automatically performs an offsite backup to satisfy 3-2-1 rule and makes sure I don't lose these files if something happens.

[jc101]

I use Synology's live backups for that, as it preserves old versions of the files and allows reverting to any date in the past it has data for. This works well for me as the backups occur automatically so I don't have to remember to commit/push. But I'm the only person working on my designs, so maybe this approach won't work as well for cases when multiple people work on the same designs. As a nice side effect, Synology NAS also automatically performs an offsite backup to satisfy 3-2-1 rule and makes sure I don't lose these files if something happens.

I run my own Git server on my Synology NAS, there is an add on Gitea package which works very well. The whole NAS gets backed up locally and offsite each day, so it's easy to handle. I notice there is an SVN solution too, might give that a try for Altium.

[asmi]

I run my own Git server on my Synology NAS, there is an add on Gitea package which works very well. The whole NAS gets backed up locally and offsite each day, so it's easy to handle. I notice there is an SVN solution too, might give that a try for Altium.

I tried both SVN and git, but I didn't find much use in either of them because it's hard to see changes as AD files are not really a code (which is what SCs are good at), so I decided to stick with live backup instead as it automatically backs up every change in a file so I don't ever need to worry about losing something, and can always go back to any of the past saved files.

[Someone]

I run my own Git server on my Synology NAS, there is an add on Gitea package which works very well. The whole NAS gets backed up locally and offsite each day, so it's easy to handle. I notice there is an SVN solution too, might give that a try for Altium.

I tried both SVN and git, but I didn't find much use in either of them because it's hard to see changes as AD files are not really a code

Comparisons is the bit Altium handles for you. GIT is just some backend that it can store to.

[RnDMonkey]

A truly disgusting acceleration of enshittification happening at Altium. Been using it since 2008 and have become something of a guru. Sucks to see it going down the toilet, and quickly.

Its attempting to maximize profits, has nothing to do with shitification at all, we already have one forum member who overuses that word, please don't be another.

(emphasis mine)
I don't know about another member's overuse of the word, but maximizing profits is the core driver of enshittification (as Cory Doctorow coined it). Though admittedly there are several differences from what's going on with Altium's platform, one overarching outcome seems consistent to me: profits at the expense of the user experience.

Now maybe you're having a great experience with the Altium platform and think this is an upward trajectory that they should continue. I do not. I think profits are not just being maximized, they are being prioritized at the expense of user experience and good will.

To put enshittification in Altium terms:

Phase 1: value to attract users. Around '07/'08 Altium consolidated its licensing structure and drastically lowered its cost, bringing in a wave of new users and massively increasing adoption. I came in around this time and have since contributed hundreds of hours to community via the official forum, and spent many hundreds of hours learning scripting and contributing to the Altium user script repository. Having a powerful, flexible, and affordable tool led to brand loyalty and adoption.

Phase 2: monetization through subscriptions and product tiers. I feel like this needs little explanation, so I'll just put few bullets:

• Addition of multiple "subscription" tiers that get you different levels of support
• Gating features behind subscription levels i.e. Multiboard, Constraint Manager, PCB CoDesign, Harness Design
• Not clearly communicating which features are or will be tiered (granted, this has improved after feedback)

Phase 3: extraction and lock-in tactics. Multiboard was one of the first egregious examples of lock-in and extraction. How could moving multi-board design from Standard to Pro tier after a few years of development and feedback not be viewed cynically? If you were a standard user using multiboard features, suddenly you get that rug pulled out from under you if you upgrade past a certain version without upgrading your subscription. At one point we were told explicitly by Altium management that perpetual license holders would be grandfathered in, but that was not the case and became subject to ad-hoc requests by individual license holders for them to honor their word. Other things:

• Selling A365 storage as being included with subscription, encouraging adoption
• Focusing product development on features that require A365
• Discontinuing perpetual licenses and subscriptions for them, removing their ability to use A365 unless they convert to term licenses
• Introducing cloud storage cost as an additional significant fee, taking away a feature if you don't pay up
• (presumably based on hints when you connect to A365 with AD 23.11.1) breaking A365 for you if you don't update to later versions

So no, I don't think I'm in danger of overusing the word. I understand how capitalism works and I understand the need for them to return a profit, but it's feeling like Altium Inc. is moving from a software company that makes a great PCB Design tool that people want to buy and use, to a revenue-generation company that includes products "involved in the development and production of electronics hardware" that people are handcuffed to.

[ajb]

It's completely upside down. I have a project, which has PCBs and other things in it. Not the other way around. So can I add a doc file to the project? Yes, but rather you wouldn't... Okay then.

This is a fundamental problem with all of these integrated cloud services -- particularly for smaller companies, which highlights the disconnect here.  If you have a hundred people spending 40hrs a week collaborating on Altium projects, then sure, getting them all onto a unified platform directly tailored to their specific needs makes a lot of sense.  You might also do the same for your MCAD team, using some other cloud platform, and where you need to collaborate across teams you can dedicate a couple of people to making sure that information is marshaled from one cloud/team to the other.  Smaller companies are a different story -- if your whole team is a dozen people across EDA/MCAD/etc, the relative cost of managing that interface is a lot higher, and it's harder to get the full benefits of a cloud designed for bigger teams.  Not to mention the overhead of managing more cloud subscriptions, and the COST of it all, across all departments.  I can think of a dozen SaaS/software subscriptions we rely on, it all adds up very quickly.

[thm_w]

I don't know about another member's overuse of the word, but maximizing profits is the core driver of enshittification (as Cory Doctorow coined it). Though admittedly there are several differences from what's going on with Altium's platform, one overarching outcome seems consistent to me: profits at the expense of the user experience.

The quality of the application has not decreased, as much as people love to complain. Altium 25 is not an overall lower quality product than Altium 23, or 21, or 19. So no, it does not match the short form definition of the word:

"Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Then there are the 3+ different "definitions" in that article that Doctorow has given which, sure some apply and some don't. But its not a meaningful word if you aren't going to nail down the definition.

Now maybe you're having a great experience with the Altium platform and think this is an upward trajectory that they should continue. I do not. I think profits are not just being maximized, they are being prioritized at the expense of user experience and good will.

Which is a different argument.
If by platform you mean A365, is it on a downward trajectory in terms of features and quality? Not yet. If the 10GB limit is actually implemented then you'd have an argument for it.

• Discontinuing perpetual licenses and subscriptions for them, removing their ability to use A365 unless they convert to term licenses

Perpetual licenses are not discontinued.
Yes the whole point is pushing existing licenses to use A365 to get that recurring revenue, there is no argument there.

No one is defending Altium here.

[ajawamnet]

[ Specified attachment is not available ] [ Specified attachment is not available ]Cloud - Term Licenses.  No man.  I don't need another "Partner" in my business.  I don't want to have to depend on - or have to pay - any other entity to allow me to access my work.

See, these software companies "blew their wad" back about the early to mid 2000's... they gave you all you really needed to replace a typewriter, a drafting board, or in our case, a light table with Bishops Graphics tape up. 

Yea, parametric/3D modeling is cool, but again that was in the mid-late 90's.  I know - I was one of Sourworks first customers- still have my 1996 install CD (lost the 95 one).  In fact, there's a vid a guy did - and he calls it Sourworks - where he compares Sourworks 1995 to 2012 -
 

Note how he shows that most everything you do in later versions was already there back in 1995.

So now we have an industry that sort of obsoleted itself.  Now what's it do?

Go to SaaS... and insure a recurrent revenue stream by making it more of a "rental" thing.  In fact, Autodesk almost had their ass handed to them by Vernor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_v._Autodesk,_Inc. ) when Judge Jones cited First Sale in reference to licenses.

As I've posted many times - from Fenwick (the IP law firm that did the first shrinkwrap EULA) :
https://www.fenwick.com/FenwickDocuments/Patent_Licensing.pdf :

"Quiet Enjoyment
Licensees, having paid for the right to use licensed technology, generally seek to ensure that nothing interferes with the benefits they have received. For example, licensees are concerned with their ability to obtain assistance from the licensor in fixing defects that are discovered in the technology, to have the right to fix the defects themselves if the licensor is unable to do so, to obtain periodic upgrades and other maintenance services from the licensor, to transfer their rights if they sell their business and to continue enjoying the technology even if the licensor becomes bankrupt."

So yea... I saw this train wreck a'comin  back in the mid 90's.   And now it's here. 

Greed.  So lovely.  Destroyed this industry.  So sad...  we had so much hope back in the 70's/80's for all this tech. 

[PlainName]

Note how he shows that most everything you do in later versions was already there back in 1995.

A simple example: he draws a box then makes it 3D by adding depth. In both cases it's the same operation, but the 2012 version is far more 'slick' and informative, so although they are notionally the same, the later version has added value.

[hwasti]

The quality of the application has not decreased, as much as people love to complain.

Many people, including me, will STRONGLY disagree with that statement.

The user-interface and the software stability took a major dive going from AD17 to AD18.

AD18, AD19, AD20 and to a lesser extent AD21 were unusable. The software was too unstable and the user interface was unusable. By AD22 they had solved enough problems in both areas that the overall value of the software was once again comparable to AD17.

I have not tried AD25 (really AD24.11). Looking at the release notes, I see no reason to waste my time trying it. There is nothing new there.

Every new release has some new, not very well thought out, features and lots of new bugs. Increasingly, the new features like wire bonding support, are targeted to narrower and narrow user bases. But any resulting changes to the user interface or application stability adversely impact all users. I call that a regression.

Then there are bugs, bugs and more bugs. New bugs greatly outnumber the new features. Not to mention bugs that were fixed that reappear after a few releases for an encore.

Occasionally they add some neat features that they eventually get working reasonably well. But that is getting progressively less frequent.

[tszaboo]

I have not tried AD25 (really AD24.11). Looking at the release notes, I see no reason to waste my time trying it. There is nothing new there.

I didn't try it yet. But by the looks of it, they only added new features to the more expensive version. Not cool. The only change I see is the single layer support.

[PlainName]

What's the single layer support in Altium 25? I searched but only found stuff that isn't recent.