Hacker News Reader

Comment by duckkg5 | Hacker News Reader

Way too expensive. Why does everything have to be a subscription?

You'll likely need to subscribe to an industry newsletter to find out why.

It sucks. But it's predictable pricing for companies buying it and it's predictable revenue streams for the makers of the software (that's if no one jumps boat en-masse).

Soooo much of the CAD industry is going this way. It sucks. Luckily there's still very good products you can buy permanent licenses for (bricscad, ironcad, zw3d, more), but way more of the big names are just trying to squeeze their customers.

Companies are in general happy with paying subscriptions since it's from their operational expense (OPEX). Why companies prefer it that way is another question. But they do.

Because, nearly 100% of the time, a subscription is cheaper for the average end user, especially one who doesn't want to be stuck using some old version that they paid for a decade ago but have used relatively sparingly/non-professionally.

Doing the math, this doesn't seem to be the case for CAD.

In 2016 (last year before subscription), Autocad was $1495/head ($1795 corrected). In 2022, the 3 year subscription is $4410, or $1470/year.

So, assuming you upgrade every 3 years, it's 3x more expensive now.

Looking at Autodesk profits [1], there was no real growth until 2014, then a steady drop towards 2016, which probably raised the alarms and required them to change something. After the subscription, there has been steady growth, with a little more than 2x from 2016 to 2022.

But, in the grand scheme of things, $122/month is really nothing for a professional user, which AutoCAD is targeted at.

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/reve...

These companies aren't moving to a subscription model because its cheaper for the users

No, they just do it to mask the TCO of their product. Dumb people pay more. End of story.

I think the answer is somewhere in between. Looking at their growth shortly before implementing this, the conclusion of y ourreductionist statement would appear to be that smart people cause companies to eventually go bankrupt. Obviously, it's not as simple as cheap = good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com