Ok Avid that is it - positively the last time I shall renew. A massive hike just before my renewal. We are still on 2021.6 (June) and so unless the development pace increases too that will be a double strike - the price increase doesn't warrant it. There is a concerted effort to wean loyal users off perpetual because it is good for you in the boardroom - well it is not good for me.
I have stayed loyal mainly because of great people like Marianna but everywhere I work is still on 2018 and so I will keep my perpetual and rent going forwards, only as and when I need it - subscription doesn't make sense for me - I don't want or need it and it's not going to happen.
I'm surprised Avid has continued perpetual licensing this long. Very few (if any?) other professional software works that way or has done for years.
I have to use Adobe (mainly for After effects as my Titler + replacement) and have no option but to pay their subscription fees.
It must be resource heavy having to support 2018 2019 and 2020 versions for all those who chose to stay on old versions and if perpetual licensing where to be dropped (or so few used it as to be unviable) I guess support for those older versions would stop as well?
As always its going to be down to each user to decide what works for them and at what price point. And yes I'm sure there will be some who find the changes unviable.
But I guess there will also be large facilities with dozens of perpetual licenses who will just renew and pass the cost along in their charges.
I'm not sure the comment about the change being "good for the boardroom" is very fair. Avid is a company that has to ensure its costs are covered by its income and I'm sure they work hard to do the best job of that they can. Its not like they are apple who can burn cash to heat their buildings!
Broadcast & Post Production Consultant / Trainer Avid Certified Instructor VET (Retired Early 2022)
Still offering training and support for: QC/QAR Training - Understanding Digital Media - Advanced Files * Compression - Avid Ingest - PSE fixing courses and more.
Mainly delivered remotely via zoom but onsite possible.
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Pat Horridge:I'm not sure the comment about the change being "good for the boardroom" is very fair. Avid is a company that has to ensure its costs are covered by its income and I'm sure they work hard to do the best job of that they can. Its not like they are apple who can burn cash to heat their buildings!
It is fair because it is patently and demonstrably true - the marketing email only references price increase for perpetual. Resolve Studio is not subscription and has about twice the pace of development to Avid, notwitstanding their business model is hardware based, though that makes no odds to me.
Pat Horridge:I have to use Adobe (mainly for After effects as my Titler + replacement)
With respect, I'm not really interested in arguing with you or anyone else, I know my business and I know what works best for me and I am merely registering a customer feedback, publicly.
Pat Horridge:I'm surprised Avid has continued perpetual licensing this long.
Well, many of us had bought into the 'perpetual' part of the idea, and would rightfully expect that to mean something.
Good luck then I wish you well in your future Resolve experiences. Of course I use Resolve as well as Premiere and neither offers me what Media Composer does. development is important and if you are prepared to sacrifice backwards compatability then thats far easier.
And yes I'm sure lots of edit processes and companies never need to go back to old versions and have no interest in a tool that does.
It all depends on what your business model needs.
For me the cost going up is a shame but the increase represents maybe a couple hours work to earn it back. So in my business model its not an issue. Certainly it would cost me far more of my time to change my workflows to save that cost.
But I appreciate for you thats not the case.
Pat Horridge:Good luck then I wish you well in your future Resolve experiences. Of cpurse I use Resolve as well as Premiere and neither offers me what Media Composer does. development is important and if you are prepared to sacrifice backwards compatability then thats far easier.
Did you read anything I wrote properly? I am not abandoning Avid. It will take a long time for TV to catch up to my perpetual current version and when it does I shall rent going forwards. Avid is mainly offline these days for me and finishing is on Resolve so it's even less important to keep up to date.
I don't mean to rude Pat - I mean this humourously and gently, truly - but you must be a bundle of fun down the pub You seem always to want to argue with me. YMMV and good luck to you - as I say I am stating my customer position. All the best
Yup my renewal not happening. This wouldn't bother me as much as it does if I felt I was seeing some awesome new features being released all the time but I am still on 2018.12.8 and have been since it came out. From what I can tell it's mostly been changes to the interface, bin organisation and a demonstrably awful title tool replacement that has taken over 3 years to still be unusable. MC has been standing still in time.
My hope would be that when they finally decide to get their *** together they have the good grace to offer long time perpetual license holders who bowed out the opportunity to pick up again at a vastly reduced rate. There's not a chance in hell that I'll be subscribing. Can you imagine paying a monthly fee to be told: "No new features this month, but you can colour the bin background differently now!".
Andi
Are we at the stage where maintaining a "perpetual" license costs more per year than just getting a subscription?
pierreh: Are we at the stage where maintaining a "perpetual" license costs more per year than just getting a subscription?
My renewal for Symph was about £265 last year (from Videoguys). Avid's website says MC Ultimate is £39/month. So its about 200 quid a year dearer to subscibe currently. Even with a 25% increase it's still cheaper to have the perpetual.
ripvanmarlowe: My renewal for Symph was about £265 last year (from Videoguys). Avid's website says MC Ultimate is £39/month. So its about 200 quid a year dearer to subscibe currently. Even with a 25% increase it's still cheaper to have the perpetual. Andi
Thanks Andi, wasn't sure as I keep seeing that it's in the 20€/month range but it maybe an entry level subscription.
Avid can't decide what percentage the increase is? More details are needed. As for support for older versions, Avid can chose not to support older versions. Force them to upgrade. That will create a revenue stream that will offset any increase that they think they need to do. Have you looked at their share price lately? This is great for the company but look what happened with GoPro. Greed sets in and the end customer is left behind. Avid over the years has transitioned as they should with an option for subscription but this seems more about forcing people to subscriptions and moreso for the shareholders.... And yeah, what happened to the monthly updates they said were going to happen??????
Another short notice attack by AVID on their loyal customers with perpetual licensing. Keep up the GOOD JOB AVID. I'm DONE with you. Avid YOU'RE NOT WORTH THE INVESTMENT.
Thanks for forcing me to save $800 for two licenses, your losses my gain. GOODBYE CHARLIE
Isn't the perpetual $399 / year and just a couple of years ago it was $299 / year? Avid massively increased the price of a perpetual license just a couple of years ago - I can't believe they are doing it again.
Can anyone tell me what the subscription prices are in USD? I can look it up but I'm at a remote location with really bad internet.
Thanks.
Steve
______________________
www.nelliedogstudios.com
In Nov 2019 I paid $284 ($299 with a $15 discount from Videoguys) for a support plan renewal for my perpetual license, then in Nov 2020 I paid $365 ($385 with a 5% discount from Videoguys).
Assuming a 25% increase that would make it roughly $480 which is roughly a 60% cost increase in 2 years.
A one year subscription to MC Utimate (non perpetual) is currently $499.99 on videoguys.
You want to charge me 60% more, you better have a title tool that works.
Avid really wants to be done with permanent licenses as they THINK it will allow them to grow into the new Adobe. They have likely run spreadsheets to say, “suppose we get 90% conversion to subscription, we will make $xxx more per license per year.” But I believe, as with most cases of “management by spreadsheet” they miss a critical “quality” of perpetual licenses (and their adherents) that cannot be put into a spreadsheet yet might put the lie to the underlying assumption – the conversion rate.
Why do I stick to a permanent license?
Let me start during the period I was a professional user (one-man-band post-production and legal / forensic audio-video specialist). I had numerous small local market projects that, after initial creation required simple updates on either periodic basis or irregular occasional basis. When the transition from analog to digital happened I had a number of clients who stuck with analog simply because their equipment still worked and “did the job”. So I kept up with MC upgrades to digital processing but maintained a Windows XP system with MC 3.5 and analog digitizing and deck control hardware for those clients. By having a permanent dongle-based license I could simply move the dongle between systems depending on weather I was doing a digital or analog project. And I was able to do this without violating my license – one seat, one user at any given time. Before I “officially” retired in Dec. of 2013, the dongle-swap stopped working, and the dongle only worked with the up-to-date version of MC (probably about MC version 7). The rare analog project updates I now had to utilize non-Avid methods to convert inputs to MC compatible digital format recreate the project from scratch, make the update, then convert the output to analog (again by non-Avid means) for return to the client. With a simple change in “license” (dongle coding) I became an inadvertent ransomware victim before that was a thing: Avid, without malice or forethought, locked me out of accessing content I had created because it was now stored in a proprietary format I could no longer access despite owning a legitimate license to the only tool that could utilize my personally created projects.
Once I retired, I maintained my permanent license by renewing the “support contract” and latest updates on my updated primary workstation(s) for a number of reasons, most sentimental. I met some Avid users and Avid employees I like and admire. I had also bought Avid stock and continue to hold it despite the fact that it is a real loser in terms of long-term performance. I truly want Avid to survive and flourish. And I do occasionally make an update for an old client or do small projects for friends and family despite having turned my retirement attentions more toward digital photography than video and audio.
I want to support a product that, despite some trying issues and times, served me well, and employees who I feel are great people worthy of my support. I have no illusion that maintaining my license / support contract is the last thread keeping the company alive, but I do believe Avid is small enough that it needs to maintain some cognizance of the “little people” that have been a part of Avid’s story for the past 25 – 30 years. It should maintain a “grandfathered”, cost effective “support contract” alternative to subscription for the occasional, non-professional users like me. For such users, full-on subscriptions make no sense whatsoever.
Why do subscriptions not work for the occasional, non-professional user? Simple; they function like legalized ransomware. If you don’t pay-up by a date certain, you lose access to YOUR OWN CREATIONS, YOUR OWN DATA, YOUR OWN CONTENT! Even without obsolescence or end-of-life of supporting tools and environment you lose you creative output because you won’t pay for the “key” to “unlock” your data. With a permanent license, even if I no longer pay the support contract for updates, I can still access MY data, MY creations.
As for the support contract, Avid makes a nice return from me WITHOUT actually having to spend a dime on me most of the time. With the few exceptions in years past of times I needed Marianna to intervene on my behalf, I have only used the acquisition of updates on my support contract. The updates cost no more to allow a support contract access IN ADDITION TO THE SUBSCIPTION user access. It costs no more to code, or post for download and update. There is no extra phone, email or in person support that I use in my present circumstance. So in one sense, my permanent license support fee is PURE PROFIT.
In that light Avid’s rationale for punishing those who want to maintain a permanent license is clearly a vapid excuse. Avid should just be honest. “We see big boy Adobe got away with subscription only, profits went up, stock price went up, so if we copy that we will become a big boy too!” In effect they should just tell it like it is: “Yo, permanent license holders – CONVERT OR GET LOST!” Yet they can’t quite bring themselves to do that because at some level they know the permanent license support contract deal makes them MORE money than if they go straight subscription. They do NOT trust their initial spreadsheet assumption. So the strategy becomes to find the threshold of pain where loss of support contract income is NOT offset by new subscription fees.
Avid is being totally dishonest when it implies that users don’t want permanent license / support contract agreements anymore. Their insecurity shows when they state, “…the entire technology industry has continued to shift from perpetual licenses to business models focused on subscription…” They are like the kid facing a parent after misbehaving with the excuse, “well, everyone else does it.” Yes, Avid’s big-boy idols do it because their monopolistic power allows them to. Adobe had near monopoly share in every content production arena – printing / publishing, graphic, photo processing, portable document and e-signature processing – when they moved into audio-video, web-base application and content building etc. And once they built up “critical mass” (i.e. had enough users with their content locked into Adobe proprietary data formats) they were in a position to jam subscription based licenses down users throats as an alternative to the “pay-per-use” model the REALLY want for any data or tool that touches content in their proprietary format. In effect, they gain “ownership” of the data users produce collecting “royalties” from users who want to access their own data!
Avid, you are not that big, you don’t have that kind of monopolistic control on the A/V content processing /delivery market that you can imitate your idol’s abuse of users without further eroding your user base and corporate health and value. Take a different lesson from Adobe: look at the number of users they lost – particularly in the digital photography space – by going all subscription. Without that move, ON1, Skylum, ACDSee et. al. would likely have been crushed by Adobe. Yet Adobe handed these companies (competitors) the gift of a decade of steady growth that has ensured their survival, and considerably lessened Adobe profits in the digital photography space with PROFESSIONAL users as well as the “power-user” and hobbyist.
A smarter move would be to let the permanent license / support contract and subscription model exist side-by-side without punitive treatment of one or the other to drive out one set of users in favor of another due to some corporate jealousy rather than actual costs or user preference. It smacks of the monopolistic abuse of users – “you want what we TELL YOU you want – and you’ll get nothing more.” Avid, do you really want to start down that path?
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