Half price Circuit Studio

[bson]

They don't expect you to stick with circuit studio it is merely a sales tool for which the customer pays.

That's exactly what it is.  The marketing term is funnel, and the goal of the product lineup is to get you to the most lucrative (for them) possible point.  They don't worry about what's useful to you (they're not engineers so are clueless), or what's a good value, or even practical - they look at what sells and drives the funnel.  So you get bizarre products where you can't add library parts or other preposterous stupidity.  The other big problem with the marketing funnel is it's constantly changing, so sure you can buy upgrades for $150 perhaps, today, but what about 5 years from now?  The product is terminated and replaced with another piece of funnel collateral, and you're given 50% off the first year of AD and told to go buy that if you want it to work properly with Window 15.

It's MUCH better to buy the top end product from an entry level player than an entry level product from a player way up the value ladder.  With something like Diptrace you're guaranteed that unless the company is acquired they will be focusing their energies on their main product, not some crippled-down bastard version that won't stand the remotest possibility of cannibalizing their cash cow.  You want the product that puts their reputation on the line, not some marketing toy.

[steverino]

They don't expect you to stick with circuit studio it is merely a sales tool for which the customer pays.

That's exactly what it is. 

Agreed.  There is no real support for this tool.  When I first purchased CS last year (1/2 off price), It would not display correctly on a Virtual Machine (Parallels) on my mac.  Sent email inquiry to Element14 and received no response.  I did however receive a marketing email asking how I liked my downloaded trial copy (I think this came from Altium proper).  I replied that I had purchased the product and had received no reply to my inquiry.  I finally got acknowledgement that my problem was already in their database and they had no fix.  The problem eventually was resolved when I updated my Parallels installation. 

Some months back I received the following offer from Altium in an email:

I understand that you have been using CircuitStudio for some time now. As you know, CircuitStudio is an incredibly intuitive ECAD tool that was designed to be stepping stone to the full-featured suite, Altium Designer.
 
Having said that, I have an exciting opportunity for you to upgrade your CircuitStudio license to Altium Designer 18, including one year of subscription for just $4,995, which is roughly a 50% discount! This opportunity is valid from now until February 23rd.

Which seems to confirm Simon's assessment.

[ahbushnell]

If you buy at the end of the quarter or end of the year (even better) you can often get a much better price on Altium. 

[Simon]

I understand that you have been using CircuitStudio for some time now. As you know, CircuitStudio is an incredibly intuitive ECAD tool that was designed to be stepping stone to the full-featured suite, Altium Designer.
 
Having said that, I have an exciting opportunity for you to upgrade your CircuitStudio license to Altium Designer 18, including one year of subscription for just $4,995, which is roughly a 50% discount! This opportunity is valid from now until February 23rd.

Yea, same thing I got word for word - junk mail, seems our money is being taken so that we can be put on a marketing list. The inconsistency in pricing is worrying as they clearly don't take the product seriously. Altium are presumably not making much out of this if Farnell can sell at 45% so it's a marketing tool for altium and farnell are making money out of old rope as all it costs them is 1 member of staff. I suppose for the two of them it is a better deal than Farnell selling Altium their customer list.....

Altium seem to be the only company that sell two versions of the same thing instead of doing what everyone else does and have tiered licensing, that way the low end CS functionality is taken care of as the core of AD and the 1000's they charge for AD gets spent on the advanced features. Nope instead they are doing it all 3 times over so we loose out because they are running around like headless chickens....

[kaz911]

I got the same mail and responded with :

Please feel free to contact me again when price for the upgrade is $1500,-

I have not heard from the Indian sales person since.