I haven’t upgraded yet as I prefer to wait for the first patch after a general release. But I will.
I did notice that the price is $100 US, and I seem to recall it being around $60 in the past. Like everyone else, I’d rather not pay more money if I don’t have to, and I’ve seen some unhappy comments about pricing. Even so, I won’t hesitate to pay the $100.
If the twice-yearly updates are now $100, that means Cubase is costing me $200 a year, or $16.68 per month. That’s not at all out of line. Pro Tools is $30 a month.
More important, and this is a critical consideration for me, I still get a perpetual license. I’d invested heavily in Adobe products when they moved to the lifetime Adobe tax scam - the moment you stop paying, your software stops working, no matter how long you’ve been paying. With Cubase, I can stop upgrading at any time (and often do if there are no features I need). My current version keeps right on working, and I lose absolutely nothing that I’ve already paid for. Also, if a company goes out of business and takes its online license servers with it, I don’t get screwed. My software keeps working.
Doing the first price increase in the middle of a global pandemic and the economic hardships it’s brought is a little tone deaf, to be sure. However, as long as they keep perpetual licensing and don’t get too out of hand on annual cost of ownership, I have no real complaints.
It’s not $200 a year, you pay the reduced cost (~$50-60 for x.5 updates) and then full $100 for x.0 updates.
So it averages at around 80/Year… i.e. 160 every 2 years. Which is $6.66/month.
i.e.:-
Cubase 9.0 December 7, 2016 ($100)
Cubase 9.5 November 15, 2017 (60$)
Cubase 10.0 November 15, 2018 (100$)
Cubase 10.5 November 13, 2019 (60$)
Cubase 11.0 November 11, 2020 (100$)
If you buy in the summer sale you normally get around 40% off too, so that makes Cubase around $45-50/Year. And as you say, you own a perpetual license and are free to make the decisions on when you wish to update.
Clearly I’m suffering from CRS (Can’t Remember… uh, Stuff). I’d forgotten about the difference in .0 and .5 pricing. So, even less reason to complain about cost.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Cubase release, already in progress…
right ! and we won’t die if we don’t update every single version. I mean sometimes is more the time we waste to buy, download, learn the new features than the actual workflow or quality improvement. Then if we upgrade once every 2 years during the summer sale, in the years of the .5 versions ,Cubase will cost us some 50$/2 years.
After the last year of negative experience with 10.5 and all the brand management attempts on this forum, all the denials about who is responsible for what, and after using cubase for nearly 20 years, I wouldnt pay for an “upgrade” like this if you reduced it to $5.
I probably wouldnt even install it if you paid ME to install it for fear of damaging my precariously stable 10.5 environment. The feature changes/additions found in 11 should be a free patch, and if the outstanding issues with 10.5 are STILL outstanding in 11, the offense taken by this is too great to even bother.
When I saw the email about 11 being available for purchase, I just about laughed myself into a coma. Not today, steinberg. Not today.
I just checked on the cost of upgrading my cubase Pro 10.5 to the current version. The price is $150 Canadian to upgrade from 10.5 (thats right not from 10.0 but 10.5).
I was hoping with Cubase 11 there would be some way to import or export information to my Dorico software. But Cubase still wants to use its own notation features and has ignored Dorico. It is a hard pass for me.
