In the Dorico licensing thread, Daniel said that the hope is to make download pricing lower than boxed pricing. The 579€ that I see, is that download or boxed pricing?
I work at a college, but alas, I am neither a teacher nor an enrolled student of music, so as I read it, I don’t qualify for educational pricing. However, I would be delighted to be corrected about this!
For new versions of the software, how will the upgrade price compare to the initial purchase price? For example, will they be free, or at a price much less than the original purchase price, or at a price comparable to the original purchase price? I’m wondering what the costs (in very rough terms) might look like for keeping Dorico up-to-date, once purchased.
Thank you for any information you can offer on these fronts.
The €579 price quoted is the list price for the boxed version; we haven’t fixed the download price exactly yet, but we will do so before the product becomes available. Quite often you can buy software products below the list price if you purchase from a dealer rather than direct from the manufacturer — dealers are competitive with one another and are often willing to sell at a slightly lower price than the manufacturer, sacrificing a bit of their profit margin in order to guarantee that they make the sale. Manufacturers, on the other hand, tend not to sell below the list price as this rather undermines the business of their dealers and distributors! So you might find that you can find Dorico at a lower price than the list price once it is available towards the end of the year.
I’m afraid I believe you’re correct that if you are working in an admin role within an educational institution rather than as a student or a teacher, you are not eligible for our special educational pricing. However, if you currently own a license (professional/retail or academic) for Sibelius or Finale, you would be eligible for the crossgrade price, which is a little more than half of the retail price (and actually a bit less than the educational price).
Updates to Dorico 1.x will be free as we add more features and fix the inevitable bugs. When the time comes for Dorico 2.0 to be released (quite some way off in the future!), existing users of Dorico 1.x would be required to pay for the update, and you can get an idea of how much those updates would be likely to cost by having a look at the price for an update from Cubase 7.5 or earlier to Cubase 8.5 in the Steinberg online shop. (Updates these days are mostly sold only direct by Steinberg, rather than by our network of dealers/distributors.)
I too was interested in this so have done a quick look
for Canberra Australia for Cubase 8.5 .
Local Canberra music shop Aud prices
Cubase Pro 8.5 $799
Cubase Artist 8.5 $429
Steinbergs site [quoted in $aud]
Cubase 8.5 upgrade $223
Upgrade 8.0-8.5 $74
From much earlier $673 + need to get usb elicenser.
versions upgrade
[ C EL LE etc]
This seems to accord with what Daniel has said re an introductory
crossgrade from Sibelius Finale etc.
At present that would be Eu 289 say Eu290 in Aud currently $aud 421
New at Eu 579 = $aud 842
Whether Dorico 2 will be more like minor upgrade [ like 8.0-8.5]
or major upgrade is in the future.
Graham Canberra.