if you compare cubase to other daws i think the upgrade prices are spot on…
alot of them are using subscription models dressed up and there a rip off because if you dont carry on paying you lose your daw.
at least with cubase if you miss a update it will still work and ill continue to support steinberg as long as they dont go down the subscription route the day they do that is the day ill take my pc offline and never update.
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There’s also the argument that by going full subscription the focus can shift to better support existing users and making bug fixes a higher priority rather than seeking out new features to sell the next paid for iteration.
Cubase as a service looks very much likely to me.
I would be saying goodbye to Cubase at that point. I do not want a product where, if I was short of money, I would no longer be able yo use it.
But equally companies look for year on year growth and retention of customers. The first full year of subscription sees growth, the 2nd year sees no growth without new customers. So we are back to new functionality to sell the thing.
Or it could be worse still like Pro Tools, very few fixes and very few new things either, just more money.
It used to be you would buy a DAW for €450 and then if you wanted to upgrade you can, but it’s optional. I would not always upgrade, I would wait for a sale or even wait 3 years and pay a little more for the upgrade.
But under subscription it looks like users pay almost the full price of a DAW every 2 years and get very little in return, they certainly do not get the equivalent of a new DAW every 2 years.
If, 5 years ago, a company said,”hey why pay €450 to buy a DAW for life when you can pay that every two years” lol …customers would have been outraged. Now they just accept it. But what’s more if you lose your job or have to save money and stop the subscription you have nothing in return. No more DAW. And you cannot do anything.
It would be fine if companies thought for a DAW the subscription it should be €65 a year so it breaks the full DAW cost down over 7 years. But they don’t, they go for crazy money like €200 per year. Or even if they made it a purchase plan so you kept it after so many years. But if you subscribe and get a DAW and a load of plugins and then fail to keep up the subs you have nothing left and a lot of projects that become useless.
Well that’s my take on subscription, yeah, I don’t like them lol
There’s good subscriptions out there, I use jetbrains software and they give you a full perpetual license as part of the subscription plan. So if you do need to cancel there’s a fall back to the previous version.
But I keep a license of Reaper as I like to support what they do even if I’m not a full-time user of it, they could become very important for people if vast majority of DAW’s go subscription only.
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I am not interested in subscriptions of any type offered by any company. However, I understand a company’s need to obtain income every year, not just years that a new version upgrade is offered,…which leads to feature creep. I would be happy to pay for annual “maintenance and bug fix” updates that actually fix both long-standing and recent bugs once and for all. However, before a user decides to buy the bug-fix updates we should be able to read a list of bugs that are fixed before we pay for the update. There would have to be real value received by users before they buy the update.
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I think annual subscription is a slippery slope and can only lead to a model akin to Protools.
How Steinberg deals with the situation is best, I wish they would be able to give us (finally) a bug free (or nearest to) version of the software…
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The disadvantage of FL offering free updates for life, is that the progress of the DAW is not the same and goes quite slow, since there is not much demand from users who paid once and are satisfied with what is there, unlike Cubase, where you pay for what you demand… However, I do think that there should be more discounts/deals like black Friday or a system of points as you buy products, or even for referral links of Steinberg products to facilitate some updates by saving some money…
On the other hand, I am a davinci resolve user, I bought a camera that offered the version 15 license, and I can update to each new version for free, it seems that video producers have more advantages than audio producers.
theres also the arguement that if you have a family too feed,mortage too pay,bills to pay ,fuel to buy,food to buy…etc the last thing you want is a subscription that could be $30 a month coming out of your bank…if you lose your job youd have free time to create music but you wouldnt have the money to pay for the sub so youd be screwed even more…so then youd get people using pirate copies which would defeat any profits theyd have.
the best overall solution is the one they have you have the choice either buy a upgrade or not either way you can still use your daw…in the past i use to miss the odd update and still upgrade on the next and price was roughlly the same and i still used cubase without any problems.
i now alot are the same and long term users like myself who have used it since the atari days will have familys now so money is much tighter than it was when your single living at home with no worrys.
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100% Of course - I dare say the majority are probably in that bracket, as it’s a mature product. But it’s primarily a ‘professional’ product that we’ve invested in so there is a premium to be paid.
My point really was more in regards to the discussion on updates and how Steinberg Each Year have to add new features that all drop on the same day as a paid for ‘update’. A subscription model would allow them to work on features and fixes throughout the year in smaller, incremental updates.
Not a fan of subscriptions myself either, but if they’re priced well and come with a perpetual fall-back option then it’s certainly more attractive for me - if there was no avoiding them.