Massive price hike on A365 coming in Jan

[JetIgniter2k]

So I just got off a call with my Altium sales rep.  He's saying that many customers are using too much data on their A365 servers and starting in January they are implementing a 10 gig cap.  They claim that we are using 100 gigs but in no way could he or the FAE give me a detailed breakdown of the actual usage.  No where could I find data usage in my admin account.  The only accurate numbers they had was users and database parts count (but not in megabytes).  The FAE said we had north of 300 projects stored; and that's ridiculous, we are at dozens of small/medium boards at the most.

So being such a nice guy that he is, he wants to get ahead of the cap and upgrade me to the "security package" at the tune of $4800/yr on top of the $15-20k I'm already paying them so we can continue to have the same level level of service that we currently have (plus SSO and MFA).

Does anyone else think this is just an absolute brazen shakedown of their loyal customers?   Where the hell do they get off charging $4800/yr for gigabytes of storage and SSO?  All other cloud companies can do that for dollars and SSO and MFA is basically free; you can have an intern set it up. 

And of course, he had to throw the covid excuse in there and wha wha wha "if there's a data breach, it's on us".  BS!  Their revenue grew spectacularly year on year since before covid and we all know damn well all I'm getting is an apology email if there's a data breach.  For $4800 I expect them to have an NSA agent manually verifying our MFA.

I can tell you right now, without even having to ask my CFO, they are not getting one extra dime out of us next year.  Even if that means we need to drop a few of our existing licenses or pulling all archived designs out of A365.  My entire team is well versed in OrCAD and we have an internal tool for viewing released designs without using up a license.

[coppercone2]

I think it might not be legal for them to try to charge you for unknown objects ?

The only way this number can be so high is if they reliability so so fucking bad that they need to have quaternary or higher levels of backup and are charging you for like backup data. Its interesting how there might not be a law. You would they a data based service would have to meet some data storage efficiency rating (like SEER on air conditioners) to be legally authorized to do anything of the sort.

I feel that if its not totally made up, it has to do with charging you for backups in a unreliable system.

It almost starts to feel like risk management figures for banks. So they might have a ultra shit data base and their covering up the ridiculous amount of data loss that is occurring because their juggling cloud servers and shit like that.

I am imaging a 'deadbeat' storage network (super incompetence)


It would be nice for them to have to pose those figures, to determine the merits of a transaction, before money exchanges hands, to ensure fairness for data-customers.

it makes me think of either ultra incompetence or like just downright scam. I think its mad shady that you are in the dark about charges. The law seems to generally crack down on 'mysterious' fees for various enterprise. It seems to really stick out. Seems like a great way to launder money too.

[nctnico]

This sounds super fishy. I'd give the boss of that sales rep a call. If I'm to pay money, I want an exact overview of what I'm paying for. Not a single cent goes out of my pocket until I get such an overview.

[coppercone2]

it might even be against your corporate guidelines to spend money in such a way

there is no way to know if its a reasonable expense. how could it be judged?

[jc101]

Interesting strategy. Make new features dependant on A365 to work. Get people to use it. Then decide to charge additional fees for putting your data into it.

The whole new direction is really quite disturbing. No-one, including Altium's own sales teams, have any idea what is really going on. It doesn't bode well for the future of Altium.

[thm_w]

So specifically storage cost not bandwidth costs right? It sounded like.

For comparison:
- Google 100GB $24/year
- Onedrive 100GB $20/year, 1TB $100/year

10GB is an insultingly low number to throw out there.
Clearly some kind of money grab.

[jduncan]

Are you on A365 GovCloud? In that case it might be somewhat justifiable...

[ajb]

So I just got off a call with my Altium sales rep.  He's saying that many customers are using too much data on their A365 servers and starting in January they are implementing a 10 gig cap.  They claim that we are using 100 gigs but in no way could he or the FAE give me a detailed breakdown of the actual usage.  No where could I find data usage in my admin account.  The only accurate numbers they had was users and database parts count (but not in megabytes).  The FAE said we had north of 300 projects stored; and that's ridiculous, we are at dozens of small/medium boards at the most.

Given how many gigabytes of history and log folder data plus other cruft I've deleted out of Altium project folders over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if their cloud project storage system is dumb enough to include all of that data, plus project outputs, across multiple versions of each project, until they actually are eating up 100GB of server space for a couple dozen small projects.  Even if that weren't their problem to solve in the first place, $4800 is an absurd price to pay for a few percent of a single modern disk until you put the 'enterprise' keyword somewhere on that sales page.  On the whole, kinda sounds to me like the rep is shaking you down about the storage to try to hit their targets for 'security package' signups.

SSO is absolutely an enterprise-tier feature on a lot of cloud platforms, so no surprise that they want to charge extra for that.  But are they really locking MFA behind that higher tier as well?  That's just completely stupid, although not a total surprise. 

[johnboxall]

Interesting strategy. Make new features dependant on A365 to work. Get people to use it. Then decide to charge additional fees for putting your data into it.

The whole new direction is really quite disturbing. No-one, including Altium's own sales teams, have any idea what is really going on. It doesn't bode well for the future of Altium.

I've received a phone call and several emails saying I haven't used A365 to its full potential and they've linked to some training. I'd totally agree they want everyone on their cloud so they can charge users more. The sales calls have slowed down as I offered them $1000 for a renewal at the 90 day mark.

[jc101]

I had those emails. I replied pointing out that Altium have stopped me from using A365 by killing the permanent licence maintenance. Being converted to a time based licence for over double the cost was a non starter.

I got a one line reply a few days later just saying it was fed back to senior management. Not even a name on the reply.

[ajawamnet]

Yea - there's no way I'm doing a Term based license.  Many others on the forum feel the same way.  And Orcad - well ... I have gotten offers for Orcad X at steep discounts that tout "perpetual" multiple times. I'm already an Orcad Pro owner and have been using it for quite a while. 
 
And I just found out that EMA-EDA has dropped the maintenance for the perpetual Pro licence. $1200 buck or so.   A fraction of Altium's silly term thing. 

In Orcad X 24.1, they now have a docked panel that looks a lot like the rules matrix the Altium is trying to push their users away from in favor of something that is similar to the constraints table that Orcad uses. 

There's vid s on Youtube for Orcad X 24.1 that demonstrates it.  All they need now is the schematic directives where you can embed rules in the directives.  I use this alot.

As an Orcad user and having clients that use Orcad, they're jealous of the way that Altium can drive rules into the PCB from the schematic using graphical directives. 

A constraint manager is a bit clunky and an additional step that has to be done to push design intent to the PCB. 

For one, directives have a graphical representation - a visual cue if you will -  that something is going on with the net on the schematic.

Two, as with directives you don't have to name each little net like you do with Constraint Manager (so you can find it in that huge spreadsheet).

Three, when I copy a section of circuitry with directives - those rules carry over to the new sheet, project, whatever. Esp with simple 2 pin unnamed nets.  It just works. I have one design with over 24 power domains - each with their own ferrites, CM chokes, filters, etc. 

So lets explore how silly using the Constraint Manager is when trying to reuse circuitry in the same project.

Well, to find every little net in the CM spreadsheet, ya gotta name every little net with some unique identifier.  Hmmm.  That can be a pain; for instance if you have a lot of power rails that have multiple passives in series with similar topology .  For one naming every little 2 pin nets is a pain.  Two, when you want to reuse that circuitry, no you have to:
- rename every little net label
- now go and redo all the constraints in the CM for those renamed nets.

Huh... that sounds silly.


So Orcad is trying to woo Altium users, and Altium is trying to woo Orcad users. 

Good luck on the later - most large corporations - the one's that Altium is trying to get into - already get Orcad for free
I did work for PADS back in the late 1980's - did most of their stock libraries for a guy named Dave Castine. Funny that he ended up as the Altium regional manager in 2014.  In 2015 he called me up and said, "I can't compete with free!!" in reference to his trying to get Altium in the larger corps that he had long term connections with.

They told him that since they buy chip design tools (in the millions of dollars), Cadence gives them full seats of OrCAD/Allegro for free.  They said they can't justify buying a tool they get for free. 
BTW: He left Altium that year and now works for Cadence.
Most of my commercial clients have gone to Cadence.  It's cheaper, it's perpetual (tho dongled) and its an industry standard.
I really don't know what Altium's management is thinking...  On one side they got free software that's offering a very affordable Redhat thing (that is perpetual/Free GNU FSF Software), and on the other is an EDA industry behemoth that's offering an equivalent product with Perpetual licenses at less than half the price. 

As to the term licenses that  Altium is forcing on everyone, well - there's some issues there.  For one, I'm not into entering into any "partnership" with a third party so that I can access my intellectual property for perpetuity.

It's my IP - my designs.  I don't need a partner. 

I can see that if you're a fly-by-night company just trying to get a product out and then sell the company off, or you're a body shop that gets a short term sub contract to support a company that uses Altium, a term thing is probably the way to go. 

But for me - I need access to my data - regardless of my relationship with Altium.  I've been doing this for over 30 years (before that all tape up and drafting boards) and have gotten screwed before with systems that require interaction with a vendor to install a suite or have to deal with them in anyway. 

I have data files for one of my patents I can no longer access.  That sucks. 

As to Altium and other SaaS suites, I don't know how they can limit liability - since they are construing an implied  partnership and forcing a joint development environment...  that EULA indemnity statement they all have might just be useless to them.

So  Going forward, for us one thing is that since we work offline, we have standalone license.  I can reinstall after a hardware failure and NEVER have to deal with them again. 

 I implore anyone that has a perpetual on demand license  to see if they can download their ALF file in the Altium License Manager tab.  I've had clients that had perpetual, that were switched to on demand with them knowing about it.  That means they still have to engage with Altium to just open the software. 


So for me, I can just stay at 24 or 25 and never have to deal with Altium again. In fact, I've done it in the past.  I've used it since it was Protel back in the early-mid 90's and have gone years without renewing my license. 

I've done over 3,000 designs with it.  Most with AD6.9 and AD15-17.  When 18,19, and 20 came out I refused to use it since they kinda destroyed a lot of features and functionality.

One project I worked on that was all done 6.9 was a major part of an award winning military system where we delivered the system way ahead of schedule, with more capability than first thought, and at 20% the cost to the US taxpayer (look up Dragon Spear in wiki and the AFSOC site).

So good luck to any Altium user in the future

[Niklas]

We got a call last week and they initially talked about the different plug ins that they wanted to sell. Later they mentioned the price increase if more than 10 GB of storage was used, but it was not until the follow up email that they mentioned that we exceed the 10 GB limit and requested us to provide the amount of users for a correct quotation. We have also not found any storage usage indicator, so we asked them about this and where we can find the info. It turns out that they don't have any solution for this and a partial workaround would be to download all the projects and check the size...
What about libraries stored in the cloud? No info provided and their default setting when downloading parts using the Manufacturer Part Search is to download all datasheets, footprints and symbols. With all datasheets I mean at least one from each supplier listed in the part search, not just the original document from the manufacturer. A range of capacitors from the same family, for instance Murata's GCM155, will all get a set of individual datasheets instead of reusing the family datasheet if they are not unticked during import.

[Ice-Tea]

I had those emails. I replied pointing out that Altium have stopped me from using A365 by killing the permanent licence maintenance. Being converted to a time based licence for over double the cost was a non starter.

I got a one line reply a few days later just saying it was fed back to senior management. Not even a name on the reply.

Got a few calls earlier this year. I pointed out their "new" licensing would be geo-locked to a location and that that would be a total non-starter for me. The rep didn't even know what I was talking about. She was going to get back tp me. 

[bookaboo]

Ha, just when I was almost warming to the idea of going with A365 as it makes library management really easy.

It's one thing paying large sums for software and subscriptions IF there's a value proposition. But Altium as a company are just so damn shady when it comes to pricing that it's inevitable they will just keep jacking the price. So at the end of this year I'll just revert to the permanent licences here and figure out a local library database.

Thinking about the value proposition
Rolling Upgrades : Meh, A24 is plenty good enough, unless they come up with something breakthrough that's a real time saver then who cares about updates.
Project Vault : Neat, but git can do the same thing.
Library Management : Very slick, but with the $ saved on subs, I could have our dev team roll something just as good for local use.

[CadenceAE]

HI JetIgniter2
Appreciate your consideration of OrCAD.  If you haven't done so you may want to check out the new OrCADX, your Altium users may find it easier to migrate too if needed

[Ice-Tea]

The end-of-year sales target is clearly approaching. Been receiving mail from Altium UK and calls from Altium Germany 

[jc101]

Had an email from a new account manager today. Though it's a little confusing. I've changed the names in the mail...

I hope you are well.

I would like to introduce myself, my name is John Smith and I am your new Account Manager at Altium UK.

I work directly for John Smith.

In this transition of Account Managers, I would like to make sure it is as smooth as possible and to ensure you are aware of who your Account Manager is for future reference.

Therefore, I would just like to inform you that I will be contacting you via telephone in the next month to introduce myself further. Please use this as an opportunity to ask any questions/ queries that you may have with your account/ subscriptions/ licenses or training you may require etc.

Of course, please use this email to contact me via email or phone whenever you need me. I will endeavor to contact you and assist in any way I can.

Have a great day and I look forward to speaking with you soon.

It seems John Smith, who works directly for John Smith is my new account manager. However, the mail was sent from Jane Doe, with a signature of Jane Doe.

I think their mailer bot is borked.

[hwasti]

He will contact you in a month? You can be certain that by then he will be replaced by Jonny Smith.

Until a year ago, account managers were lasting less than a year. In 2024, they seem to be lasting less than a month.

[jc101]

Until this e-mail I've dealt with the same person for a number of years. I wouldn't be surprised with the quantity of negative feedback from customers, and potentially falling numbers, they finally left. When you high sales rep turnover it is often reflective of just how bad things are within the wider company.