Author Topic: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )  (Read 12539 times)

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Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« on: October 17, 2018, 08:06:32 am »
If we all just said to Altium, from 2019, we are only going to pay $500 a seat for renewals, and enough of us did it, what coudl they do.    I'm tired of being treated to buggy code.
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Offline NivagSwerdna

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #1 on: October 17, 2018, 08:17:31 am »
They would go to their best customers and offer them a deal (which they might already have done) and the rest would have to put up with it or migrate?

They have a service... You want it... You pay.

It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?

What you need is competition... Try diptrace.
 
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Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2018, 08:19:54 am »
They would go to their best customers and offer them a deal (which they might already have done) and the rest would have to put up with it or migrate?

They have a service... You want it... You pay.

It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?

What you need is competition... Try diptrace.

Yes, i want somethign. And when i pay for it, i expect it to work. Version 18, is somethign like 2500 issues in bugcrunch.   Seriously you want me to pay for that.      ALtium need to understand that they need to supply somethign workable.
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Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2018, 08:30:48 am »
So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?

Tim
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Offline Kjelt

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2018, 08:34:55 am »
It seems that capitalism is increasingly confusing to people?
It is confusing if it does not work like in this case, they get paid for doing a lousy job and you seem to have no choice to accept it ?
Capitalism should be about competition and getting better products through innovation  ;)
So indeed the only step left when a company is screwing you over, is to not pay anymore, switch to an older version or other product and sent a clear message.
 

Offline Ice-Tea

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2018, 09:27:11 am »
So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?

Tim

Problem is with some customers: it looks bad if you don't have/can't afford/don't want the latest-and-greatest.

Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #6 on: October 17, 2018, 09:34:03 am »
So sit on the last release of version 14 or 16 or whatever and live with it?

Tim

Problem is with some customers: it looks bad if you don't have/can't afford/don't want the latest-and-greatest.

I've never had customer that cared about what EDA tool i used was.   I dont' sell schematics/pcbs. I sell products.
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Offline Ice-Tea

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #7 on: October 17, 2018, 09:36:00 am »
Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.

Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #8 on: October 17, 2018, 09:43:22 am »
Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.

Why would anyone use 18.x with 2900 bugs?

Anyway are you in or out of the protest.
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Offline M4trix

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #9 on: October 17, 2018, 10:02:21 am »
Stick to Altium Designer 17.1.9. It's the latest stable version. All after that is a bugfest.  :--
 

Offline BradC

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #10 on: October 17, 2018, 10:13:30 am »
Stick to Altium Designer 17.1.9. It's the latest stable version. All after that is a bugfest.  :--

I'm still using 13.1.2 and Protel 98.
 

Offline Ice-Tea

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #11 on: October 17, 2018, 10:14:45 am »
Which is why I said "some". I sometimes do freelancing for larger companies. If the entire company is on Altium 18.1, they won't accept KiCad. Or Altium 17.0 for that matter.

Why would anyone use 18.x with 2900 bugs?

Anyway are you in or out of the protest.

Because it's the latest and greatest. It has a higher number. It must be better.  :-DD

I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.

We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.

Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #12 on: October 17, 2018, 10:58:07 am »
Solutions, in order idealness:
1 = no bugs, not going to happen.
2 = They continue to patch existing versions until they as bug free and stable as possible before releasing a new version with new features, so people have the option to buy that as a perpetual license and stick with it.
3 = They offer an opt-out clause at any time were once you find a stable version you are happy with you can exit (or pay fee to exit) and keep that exact version as a perpetual license.

They aren't going to do any of that though, it's in their vested interest to have everyone on subscription. Last I checked about half of the customer base were on subscription.

In theory it's possible to protest vote changes at Altium, and the best way to do that is to NOT be on subscription and let them know why.
A big thing in their yearly report to shareholders is how many people they have converted to over to subscription, and if that number start dropping instead of increasing, everyone takes notice.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #13 on: October 17, 2018, 10:59:48 am »
I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.
We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.
Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.

As someone who worked there I can assure you that that's actually the thing they fear the most!
 

Offline mairo

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #14 on: October 18, 2018, 04:54:59 am »
I have my own protest: I stopped paying my subscription earlier this year. I simply don't use it often enough to warrant the price. So my plan is to re-activate a few years down the road if needed/forced to. They will then slap me in the face with overdue subscription fees and I will laugh in their face at the 5k bill.
We will then argue, I will cry and be quite pathetic and they will give me the renewal for a fraction of the 5k. Which will be along the lines of the 500/year you mentioned.
Yeah. That's how it will go. It will be a beautiful, moving moment. Possibly there will be flowers and a rainbow.

Haha, this is how I have pretty much always done it with them 8) Not to the extend of 5 years, but mostly 1.5 - 2.5 year periods.
Have been working for several companies as a contractor at a same time and I can see how they all get different subscription offers - from AU$900 to AU1800 per year (this is what makes me angry). Nothing different b/w the companies and all with 1-3 seats only.

I think the best is if alot of people do not renew their licenses, they will start dropping prices eventually. It would have been great if all had to renew at the same time, in which case a large community of users could realy put pressure on them, but as we all have our subscriptions at different times this is not that easy to achieve.     
 
« Last Edit: October 18, 2018, 04:57:38 am by mairo »
 

Offline Kjelt

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #15 on: October 18, 2018, 08:47:50 am »
I think the best is if alot of people do not renew their licenses, they will start dropping prices eventually.
I don't know, these companies can be so arrogant they will raise the prices for the existing users to compensate the loss of revenue, it would not suprise me a bit.
 

Offline julianhigginson

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #16 on: October 19, 2018, 05:53:26 am »
My biggest problem with altium license fees is they keep spending it to develop new stuff that they then want to charge me thousands more to buy extra licenses for!!! like vaults and now the new 365 cloud thing and oh yeah,, there was that PDN plugin thing... all of this is paid for with subscription fees, and then they want to sell it to us again? then make us pay subscriptions on those things too? hmmm.

At the end of the day the main codebase being updated is good. they still add in new useful capabilities that make my job easier and me more effective - and I am prepared to pay for that. But when so much of their dev money seems to be going on stuff that then needs thousands and thousands of $ to buy on top of the base program, (then thousands more ongoing to keep up to date!) I start to wonder how long Altium will even be around for. And then I start to wonder if I should be looking for the next EDA already?
 

Offline glenenglish

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #17 on: October 24, 2018, 06:29:04 am »
yes...

Altium Bugcrunch is up to 2506 bugs now.....

Even if half of those are real, that's about 500 odd added in the past 12 months...

AD18 in my opinion is defective software.  It was producing corrupted Gerbers for a while.... I think that meets the definition of defective software....AD17 was fine. They took away a bunch of features like key shortcuts, useful dialogs, ruined the color schemes and gave us a nearly unusable product.

Altium, just please fix the bugs. Altium forums are private behind username and password, if the world actually could read the forums  they might consider another product,
Altium does not listen to its user base. I think  they rely on adding new subscribers  and don't care about the loss of old subscribers.
 
Altium please fix the bugs first. Until AD18, it was a great product.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2018, 06:38:47 am by glenenglish »
 

Offline Kjelt

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #18 on: October 24, 2018, 07:19:33 am »
If I read that i think: where is the SW quality control?
Why did the automated tests and unit tests not fail ?
This is in SW terms a disaster in the making  ;)
 

Offline glenenglish

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #19 on: October 24, 2018, 07:27:28 am »
What is Altium's plan to clean up the product ? AD 17.1.9  was OK ...AD18, is  widely believed to be defective software.

1) Bug crunch is up to 2506 items. Even if 50% of those are real, that's alot of unanswered posts.
-Altium you are supposed to be taking note and interfacing with the users, not just letting BugCrunch count to infinity !.

2) Altium claims on their website  they are putting on 6000 new users per year.
-Is the business strategy to ignore existing users, not fix the software not bother about the say, lost 1000 subs per year of disgruntled users ?

It reminds me of a business strategy used for Health Clubs and Gyms. Just keep adding members that never use the facilities, and never maintain the facilities..

I talk to the sales people who are sympathetic to my complaints but have no input or control  it seems.

The biggest disagreement I hear privately among many is that Altium want to penalise  / charge users for ignoring paying subs for AD18, which users consider is defective software. There is plenty of grounds for it being considered defective software- Look at the Gerber disaster !

I considered organising a boycott of paying subs   and bringing in the ACCC, but if Altium's business strategy is just to  bank on adding new users and ignoring the unhappy ones, I do not think not paying subs is going to work, it will be within their strategy. They won't care.

There are a couple of options  :

1) You can try and do a deal with Altium to avoid paying for the defective AD18 release.  That might work, depending on your history with the product., and how long you have been out of maintenance.

2) Just stay on AD 17.1.9 for 4  years which is about the time to re coup buying Altium from new in 4 or 5 years time. When it might be fixed.
 

Offline cadguy68

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #20 on: December 18, 2018, 04:36:29 pm »
We terminated maintenance/subscription/extortion this year.  After 10 years we've paid over $100k for a tool that's basically the same as it was at V6.  Sure, a few bells-and-whistles were added that are useful, but all in all it's the same tool with many of the same bugs from 2006.

We're staying with V16.1.2 for now, but are paid up through V18.  Not going to use V18, maybe V17 if it's any good ...

We're using that money, annually, to buy other software tools that bring us features and functionality that Altium can't seem to provide.

We're done paying to be alpha/beta customers for untested, buggy, and unreliable software.
« Last Edit: December 18, 2018, 04:43:25 pm by cadguy68 »
 

Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #21 on: December 18, 2018, 05:52:19 pm »
There is no way i'm going to pay them now for subscription for some software that was buggy.  I'll make them an offer of US$1500 to update to v19, after a satisifactory period of evaluation.

Simply put,  you cna't trust altium. 
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Offline james_s

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #22 on: December 18, 2018, 06:45:25 pm »
2500 bugs is not all that unusual, I've worked on software products that had >10,000 open bugs. Of course many of these were so old they applied to features that were long ago removed or reworked and many were very minor but they were still bugs.

Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.
 

Offline tszaboo

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #23 on: December 18, 2018, 07:06:45 pm »
Someone else's money goes to someone else.
Why would I get involved?  :-//
 
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Offline mrpacketheadTopic starter

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Re: ALtium renewal pricing. ( group protest )
« Reply #24 on: December 18, 2018, 07:29:01 pm »
Easy solution here though is to just use something else. I refuse to rent software as a matter of principal and there is nothing that will ever make me reconsider. Fortunately KiCad is free and does the job.

Something else.  Kicad is not an option for doing serious work. Its just way too slow.   I too dont' like the concept of renting software either, but altium does. well, they want to sell it to you and then rent it.   The market for PCB design software is just too small.
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