sorry … I think it stinks of the scam worth method. Especially for the little improvement made. They take us for beta testers and get paid for unfinished products.
This is all quite clear and transparent. Over at Scoring Notes I’ve published an analysis which breaks it down a bit further and also adds some actual pricing details about what you can expect to pay for the Dorico upgrade, and what (or if) you can expect to save, depending upon what version of Dorico you currently have, and when you obtained it:
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Lvb, you are in the privileged position of NOT having to buy any dorico product you don’t want. Bask in the glory of not giving Steinberg another penny, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.
But let’s not condemn the product before we’ve even seen what it is.
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This public service announcement is one of the reasons I like Dorico - “here’s how to pay less!”. Fab stuff. Excited!
@lvbeethoven1 Software companies have to make money some way. I don’t know of a single application that could be called “finished”
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So if I understand this correctly, you’re basically rewarding people that didn’t upgrade earlier and punishing customers that have kept up with the latest version? Odd decision…
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That’s not the case at all. Those who upgraded to 3.5 at an earlier date have had ample opportunity to take advantage of the features it provides. The grace period exists so that new adopters aren’t blindsided by a new release right after they decide to upgrade to 3.5. For a business model like Dorico’s which is not subscription based, this is a courtesy that helps preserve the customer’s choice to upgrade when they want rather than by a forced subscription. They’re certainly not obligated to offer anything.
Personally, I upgraded to 3.5 on the day it was released, and it has paid for itself many times over since then. I’m confident that 4.0 will provide the same benefit to those who choose to upgrade when it’s released.
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Did I read it wrong? If you have 3.5 it will be cheaper than if you have 3,2 or 1…
(Also if you upgrade to 3.5 now, it will be a free update)
I’ve heard this sort of objection before, and I don’t get it.
If you stayed on 3.0, then from May 2020 to the present, you did not have access to the features and updates included in 3.5.
If you upgraded to 3.5, you paid to get access to those features for the past 20 months.
If you want what an update has to offer, you can choose to buy it. If not, stay with what you have.
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Well, actually it depends on the different prices: if the upgrade from 3.5 is 99€/$, and the update from 3 is 59€/$ (with free upgrade thanks to the grace period), Bollen has a point. But Adtino has a point too: if you’ve been using 3.5 for a long time, you’ve been working with features that were worth the price. All in all, there will always be people complaining, nonetheless I find that Daniel’s PSA is very elegant.
And if the price is not 99 but less, the problem won’t be so prominent… Wait and see 
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Not at all. What sense would it be to charge customers the full upgrade fee only a week or two before the next release, only to then charge them again? How would that be user friendly? (It wouldn’t.) The users that are just updating didn’t get to use 3.5 for a full year like many of the rest of us.
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No, that’s not the motivation. Anybody who updated to Dorico Pro 3.5 at any time since its release in May 2020 has benefited from the features added in that version, plus a number of maintenance releases, and they hopefully have derived great value from the features and improvements they contained.
We have done our best to be fair to our customers over the past year. When we had a sale at the end of last summer, we still expected Dorico 4 to be released before the end of 2021, and so we extended the grace period back to the start of that sale, so that anybody who bought in that sale (or thereafter) would be entitled to a free update to Dorico 4 when it arrives. As it happens, we needed to delay Dorico 4 a little further so that we could ensure Steinberg Licensing is in the best possible shape at the time of release, which means that we have ended up extending the grace period a fair bit further than we originally intended. That will have an impact on how many updates to Dorico Pro 4 we can sell, but we did it nevertheless because we want to do the right thing by our customers.
Steinberg’s grace period policy, which has been in place for many years and across all of its products, always creates the opportunity for somebody to save some money on an update. For example, you could have a license for Cubase 10.5, and buy the update to Cubase 11, but not activate it until Cubase 12 is about to be released, thus qualifying them for a grace period update to Cubase 12. The update from Cubase 10.5 to Cubase 11 is cheaper than the update from Cubase 10.5 to Cubase 12, so you can save a bit of money that way. This isn’t something that we necessarily encourage, but it’s the way our update pricing system works, and since that’s the way it works, customers are free to use it to their advantage if they wish. (This kind of thing gets discussed a lot more on the Cubase forum than it does here on the Dorico forum.)
This is a similar situation: users who have Dorico Pro 3.0 right now qualify for the “small” update price to buy Dorico Pro 3.5, but when Dorico Pro 4 is released, they will suddenly find themselves qualifying for the “large” update price. The difference in price between the small and large updates is not insignificant, and so I wanted to continue to try to do the right thing by our customers and make sure that they are aware that they have a short-lived opportunity to save money on the Dorico Pro 4 update because of the extended grace period, if they are interested.
I am confident that Dorico is more than worth the money we ask for each new update. If you’ve used Dorico 3.5 for even a few months, I’m sure you’ve had your money’s worth, and if you’ve used it since its release in May 2020, you can surely have no complaints. If you’ve had Dorico Pro 3.5 for more than the last four or five months, you will need to buy the update to Dorico Pro 4 because you are outside the grace period (which would normally be, let’s not forget, just four weeks), and again I’m confident you will get your money’s worth.
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I think that the price Steinberg is alluding to is very generous. And I see this conversation as Steinberg doing you a favor to let know of a quirk due the timing of the update that could be to your advantage. Don’t punish them for a good deed!
2020 was an expensive year for everything! There was another vendor this year whose upgrade I originally decided I would forego as the value proposition kinda hurt my feelings. (I did finally pick it up in a year end sale price that I thought was almost fair. ) I know that is just anecdotal, but I’m saying if some of those other products I bought are any kind of baseline - then what we do know about 4.0 will make this upgrade a better value than any other product I purchased last year.
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A few things I’ll point out here which are illustrative of the problem I take with this — first, there’s no “suddenly” involved in this situation. Dorico 4 was very prominently teased on the forum and on Facebook as being a 2021 release, and its subsequent delay to early 2022 was also very prominently communicated. Even if someone managed to miss all of that, Dorico 3 was released in September 2019, twenty-eight months ago — it shouldn’t be unreasonable for someone so far behind to presume they will be closer to the “large” update price. So if the grace period exists to benefit users and shield them from being blindsided, know that it is effectively impossible in this situation for anyone other than the most uninformed Dorico users to be blindsided. And even though you say
…here we are, with this going beyond encouragement and being official messaging.
Next, you say that the difference in price is not insignificant and you want to do right by your customers. If the point of the grace period is so people don’t feel blindsided, fine, but I certainly feel blindsided by the fact that even though I should be higher up the upgrade tree — a position which usually affords one the least up-front upgrade cost, I might instead pay nearly double what other users will pay to upgrade (and potentially more than two-and-a-half times more in aggregate, going 3 → 3.5 → 4). I know the half-point upgrade of 3.5 already introduced some irregularities in the whole process and balancing that with what is to be a full-bodied version upgrade, but this just isn’t how any of Dorico’s previous upgrades have worked, and hopefully won’t work again. And to clarify, none of this is to complain about what each constituent version of Dorico is worth (which, given what it does in our work sphere, will always be an effective bargain) but is to only take issue with what seems like both an excessively sweet deal and an unusually earnest attempt to communicate that deal to people further behind in the upgrade path with little consideration for up-to-date users in the meantime.
I’m now mixing a quote from what you said on the Facebook group rather than this forum, so forgive me, but I also resent the notion that I should “vote with my wallet” on this — no, no I’d like to vote with my words. First, this presumes that I work in a field that allows me to linger on outdated software, which maybe some people can do, but I simply can’t afford to do. But more importantly, I don’t want the only way to feel heard on a matter to be through either intended financial harm to the software and its developers or through some kind of boycott. I’d rather bring up issues as they occur and, hopefully, see attempts at resolution in the future.
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Joshua, there is never going to be a perfect solution here. Some people are going to be better off than others in any scenario you care to name.
If you’re happy with what you’ve received for the price you’ve paid, don’t look at the plates of the other diners.
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There has never been this drastic a discrepancy, let alone an official attempt to make sure the word is spread as widely as possible to take advantage of it. You can say there’s no perfect solution but this is clearly not in the right direction.
This is just a silly statement. You’re telling someone to be a consumer by putting blinders on and that’s how they’ll attain customer satisfaction, as opposed to observing and being reassured by fair practicing and pricing. You’re welcome to dismiss my and others concerns with the handling of this with as concise of statements as you like, but it’s reasonable for the diners to, within reason, pay relatively comparable amounts for comparable meals. Two-and-a-half times is, for me, quite significant for the exact same meal. This is what I’m commenting on; not any satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one or more of the courses. (I know we don’t have an official upgrade price so I am basing these on the estimated figures Philip proposes in his Scoring Notes article, but certainly if his estimates are wildly off I should hope Daniel would right the ship on this matter).
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Would you be content if those on v3 had to pay more than you, but your price was unchanged?
That’s just envy.
Companies regularly have sales and discount deals. And it’s in their interest to entice users onto the latest, supported version.
To prolong the analogy: the other diners have had to wait 18 months for their starter. You haven’t.
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No, I’d be content if the current upgrade pricing and official commentary around it were consistent with previous practice.
When Dorico 3 came out, upgrades from 2 were $99.99 and upgrades from 1 were $149.99. Using the grace period policy the most advantageous position a user on Dorico 1 could be in would be to pay $99.99 for their upgrade to 2 within the period and receive 3 for free, thus paying the same as a Day One up-to-date upgrade but netting them a 33% savings. This policy was in place, but not widely communicated in official messaging.
When Dorico 3.5 came out, upgrades from 3 were $59.99 and upgrades from 2 or prior were $159.99. Using the grace period policy the most advantageous position a user on Dorico 2 or prior could be in would be to pay $99.99 for their upgrade to 3 within the period and receive 3.5 for free, thus paying 166% of a Day One up-to-date upgrade but still netting them about a 37% savings. This policy was in place, but not widely communicated in official messaging.
When Dorico 4 comes out, upgrades from 3.5 are likely to be $99.99 and upgrades from 3 or prior are likely to be $159.99. Using the grace period policy the most advantageous position a user on Dorico 3 or prior could be in would be to pay $59.99, the smallest upgrade fee in Dorico’s history, for their upgrade to 3.5 within the period and receive 4, the “single largest release in Dorico’s history” for free (quote is paraphrasing Daniel, I believe from the Facebook group), thus paying 40% less than a Day One up-to-date upgrade and netting a 62% savings over what they could have to pay.
My issue overall is that Daniel or anyone else at Dorico/Steinberg saw that the half-point upgrade put them on track for one subset of Dorico users to be in a much better position than previous practice and pricing had allowed for and rather than make an attempt to correct this through a proper setting of the regular upgrade fee in relation to this or to even simply quietly not make a big deal of this unusual scenario, they instead chose for the first time to communicate this rare position as widely as possible, with posts on the forum, Facebook, and a companion article in Scoring Notes.
It is completely fair for me to then comment that up-to-date users for the first time find themselves in a worse position than the past for no real reason and that I would like more careful attention to such situations be taken in future.
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Joshua, I completely understand your point of view. Perhaps if I explain my thinking a little further it will help (or perhaps it won’t!).
As this discussion clearly demonstrates, issues concerning pricing always generate passionate response, whether it’s from the person who was unlucky enough to buy the software a few days before the beginning of the grace period, or the person who is unlucky enough to buy the software just before or just after a sales promotion, or whatever it may be.
We have thousands of (hopefully, overall very happy) Dorico 3.5 users, but in the experience of my colleagues in the Cubase world, we tend to find that “small” updates attract a slightly lower update rate than “big” updates, and that has been borne out with the Dorico 3.5 update as well. As a consequence, there will also be thousands of Dorico 3.0 users, who are not necessarily any less “committed” or “supportive” or “brand loyal” than Dorico 3.5 users, but who simply chose not to buy the update to 3.5 because it was perceived as a smaller release, due to nothing more than its version number. (As I’ve explained before, we certainly felt that 3.5 was substantial enough to have been called 4.0 and to therefore use the higher upgrade pricing associated with, say, the 3.0 updates, but because of the attempt to get our release schedule back on track, we felt it would be too soon to ask for another full update fee, only nine months after the release of Dorico 3.0.)
I foresaw, therefore, that we might soon be in the situation where Dorico 3.0 users would be faced with a larger update price to Dorico 4.0 than they might have anticipated, and which could result in a mixture of complaints and, potentially, lost sales. I had (apparently misplaced) faith that on the whole those users who had updated to Dorico 3.5 had certainly had their money’s worth from the new features in that version, and would not respond negatively to me pointing out to other users who had not had their benefit over the past 20 months that they had a short-term opportunity to use the vagaries of our grace period and historical update pricing to their advantage.
With the benefit of hindsight, I will certainly think twice about this in the future. The past 24 hours has been a reminder that no good deed goes unpunished! But I do absolutely understand the point of view of you and those other users who have expressed disappointment about this and it will definitely inform my decision-making about talking about matters concerning pricing in future.
In terms of how we will handle this in future: we do not plan any further “small” updates for Dorico. Unless plans change very significantly (and of course I cannot give a cast-iron guarantee that they will not, as the past two years have provided ample illustration that the best-laid plans can and will go awry), the next major version of Dorico that will attract a fee after the forthcoming 4.0 release will be Dorico 5.0, which we hope will come some time in 2023. We have no plans for a paid Dorico 4.5 update, or indeed any future paid x.5 updates to any future version.
We cannot guarantee that no situation will exist in the future where a user on an earlier version may pay less for the new version than a user on the latest version. As explained above, it is a natural consequence of the way our grace period system works that somebody who prior to the release of the new version qualifies for the “small” update can buy that update and then activate it in the grace period to get a free update to the new version, and will have spent less than the customer who bought the “small” update earlier and therefore does not qualify for the grace period update.
The flip side of this situation, of course, is that the user who foregoes updating to the latest version until immediately before the release of a newer version also foregoes the use of the features and improvements in that version of the software for almost the entire period in which it is offered for sale as the latest version. They have paid less than the customer who has kept up to date, but they have received less value, too. They have got a bargain on the update to the new version, and they’ve of course also got the accumulated features of any interim versions to boot, but they have not been able to benefit from those features until that point.
This is an extraordinary situation created by the unusual circumstances of the last 18 months. I do not foresee that we will have a four-plus month grace period in future. I do not foresee that we will have any further x.5 updates in the future that will extend such a large pricing differential between the “small” and “large” updates for such a long period of time.
I can only offer my apologies to those Dorico 3.5 users who feel aggrieved by my decision to try to help Dorico 3.0 users save money on the update. As I have said above, I will certainly think twice about providing any advice about such matters in future.
I remain hopeful that we will make up for any disappointment you feel today when you see what we have in store in Dorico 4 in due course.
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