Too costly to upgrade

[Simoon]

Does anyone else find the upgrade price too high?

Here in the UK it's £146.09, which is quite steep, so i've never bothered upgrading, even discounted in their twice yearly sale, I think it's over priced. I have a meagre income and that is my food bill for 2 months.

I have an Ableton live 9 license and although it's far from perfect, I can't justify the upgrade of my Bitwig 1.3 license. I'd love to be learning the Bitwig method of making electronic music but at £150, they can't expect me to open my wallet.

Bring it down to around £80 or lower and i'll upgrade but not before, especially when you only get a year of updates. It's outrageous.

[bolba]

Nope. Work harder ))

[apoclypse]

I agree. The software starts to get pricey at some point. I would stick with Ableton and wait until they have a deal on the upgrade to 11 and get that instead.

[pdxindy]

Does anyone else find the upgrade price too high?

Here in the UK it's £146.09, which is quite steep, so i've never bothered upgrading, even discounted in their twice yearly sale, I think it's over priced. I have a meagre income and that is my food bill for 2 months.

I have an Ableton live 9 license and although it's far from perfect, I can't justify the upgrade of my Bitwig 1.3 license. I'd love to be learning the Bitwig method of making electronic music but at £150, they can't expect me to open my wallet.

Bring it down to around £80 or lower and i'll upgrade but not before, especially when you only get a year of updates. It's outrageous.

Sell your Live license and then you have the money to upgrade to the current Bitwig 4 (+12 months). The current version is good enough to make music for the next decade without any further need of an upgrade.

[Fedor_Tkachev]

disagree, it's a great deal on the daw market, if not the best. You don't have to upgrade just to have the latest version.

[sbmongoose]

When they had their last set of discounts, I bought it from JRR Shop for $108.36 using their KVR member discount code. Paypal's currency conversion on that day meant it was £81.24 for me, as I'm also working in GBP. Oh, my Paypal account also allowed me to spread that over 3 months, so a little over £25 a month was less of a lump sum too, as who knows what can happen with jobs and with the UKs Furlough schemes, and jsut the world in general right now.
I also waited to redeem it, as the 4.0 didn't seem enough of an upgrade for me from 3.3 (but would be a heck of a change from 1.3, just for the Grid alone), but their current U-He promo has tipped me into registering it now, even though for me 3.3 to 4 doesn't add much I think I want. But hopefully 4.1 or later in the 12 months will add something that piques my interest, otherwise I guess I jsut got a new U-He synth for £81.24. But even so, that's still £50 less than Plugin Boutique currently has Hive 2 or Repro for, so not a total loss anyway.
So 12 months of updates plus a bonus new synth (still deciding which), for £82 doesn't sound too bad a deal.
But yes, today almost £150 would be more painful, although if either free synch offer is a benefit to you, or maybe it's something that can be sold to go towards the upgrade (honestly no idea if it can, so please don't hold me to that one), then maybe it's not so bad.

[Simoon]

It wouldn't be so bad if you got a physical item with it's own CPU but developers rarely even offer a boxed CD and booklet any more. It's all downloads. It's the user who buys the computer, pays for the operating system etc....the developer codes their product, uploads it to a server and waits for people to buy it.

Think about 1000 upgrade sales per year at £150 a pop....yep £150 000 a year. Now think that they're much more likely to sell 10 000+ (I estimate this to be 50 000 +) upgrades so we're now talking well over £1m and counting per year and they don't even have to guarantee the software to be bug free...ever!

No wonder why the software market has been growing at such explosive rates....it's full of lazy "get rich quick" types, whilst the majority of users, such as myself work physical jobs where £150 could be spent on something practical. I think they've lost touch with the realities of finance because they've had it too easy.

Drop the price guys....in half at the very least.

[Simoon]

disagree, it's a great deal on the daw market, if not the best. You don't have to upgrade just to have the latest version.

And I disagree with you. I think it's a terrible deal. One of the worst in the DAW world.

Even Ableton are cheaper....and they've currently taken the 3 year upgrade path. That would be £450 in Bitwig world. FO buttwank

[sbmongoose]

Ok, but lets base it on your minimum figues for a minute, and it's £150,000. Maybe a staff of 10 people, that's £15,000 each. Assuming say a 45 hour working week, that's below the UK's living wage, and that's just paying staff, nothing about rent and elctricity and equiptment for Bitwig to keep going. Good luck even renting a small office for £150K a year.
As for 10K or 50K users, yeah, I can certainly imagine it may be somewhere between these numbers, but that doesn't mean everyone upgrades as soon as their lisence runs out.
Polarity and Mattias Holmgren are probably the biggest Bitwig Youtubers, rounding up to 10K and 25K subscribers each, so assuming Mattias Holmgren with 25K subscribers (some people will subscribe for non-bitwig things, and not every Bitwig owner will be subscribed), but ok, lets assume everyone who subscribes to his channel owns bitwig, and for everyone subscribed there is another person who isn't, so 50K users. That still doesn't mean everyone who owns Bitwig buys every update each year. You didn't, or do you think you are the only person ever who didn't? Or that everyone who bought it paid full price? I didn't, or am I the only person who waited for a sale?
So could you maybe consider that over the same 3 year upgrade time that you are talking about Ableton being on, and Bitwig being on, both have introduced a number of features. However, for you to get the new features now in Bitwig (if there are any new features that you want. If there aren't then it's all a bit of a moot point), for your £150 upgrade you will get a lot of new features. I don't know, so what is the price of the upgrade to Ableton in the same 3 year period? In your view, has Bitwig added more or less new features in those three years compared to Ableton? I'm not sayng they have or haven't, just asking your thoughts about what each have added that may be of benefit to you over the course of those three years?

[Simoon]

Ok, but lets base it on your minimum figues for a minute, and it's £150,000. Maybe a staff of 10 people, that's £15,000 each. Assuming say a 45 hour working week, that's below the UK's living wage, and that's just paying staff, nothing about rent and elctricity and equiptment for Bitwig to keep going.

What do you think they pay their staff? A lot more than 15k a year don't you think?

Personally, I think manual workers should be better paid than computer coders. Don't you agree?

I think the actual upgrade sales are closer to 50K, so that's a hell of a lot more in the bank.

Good luck even renting a small office for £150K a year.

I can find you an office here in Plymouth for a fraction of that. Maybe they should consider moving?

As for 10K or 50K users, yeah, I can certainly imagine it may be somewhere between these numbers, but that doesn't mean everyone upgrades as soon as their lisence runs out.

I actually said between 10 - 50k upgrades. Not new licenses, so that's yearly.

So could you maybe consider that over the same 3 year upgrade time that you are talking about Ableton being on, and Bitwig being on, both have introduced a number of features. However, for you to get the new features now in Bitwig (if there are any new features that you want. If there aren't then it's all a bit of a moot point), for your £150 upgrade you will get a lot of new features. I don't know, so what is the price of the upgrade to Ableton in the same 3 year period? In your view, has Bitwig added more or less new features in those three years compared to Ableton? I'm not sayng they have or haven't, just asking your thoughts about what each have added that may be of benefit to you over the course of those three years?

Whatever way you look at it, 3 years of Bitwig updates is going to be costly....very costly but the truth is, we're both making assumptions because we don't have access to the figures.

However, i'll post a fact.....i'm not paying £150 for an upgrade, neither am I paying £110 in a sale. It's too much.

Bitwig may be brilliant but on principle, I can't see me making the switch any time soon.

[fairlyclose]

I dont really care about the economics for Bitwig as a company as far as if the upgrade price is fair or not. I am more concerned about what does almost $300 in my money get me compared to what else I can buy with that. For me the upgrade is not worth it - I am on v3 and that does what I want it to do. I may never need to upgrade, Bitwig is not my only DAW and it is just great for what it does for me, but as with products like Kontakt, it works great as is so I might not upgrade for a few years.

[billcarroll]

...
Personally, I think manual workers should be better paid than computer coders. Don't you agree?
...

no

[starflakeprj]

Polarity and Mattias Holmgren are probably the biggest Bitwig Youtubers..

Don't forget Venus Theory, 70k+ followers. He does not use Bitwig exclusively, but he use it a lot.

[sbmongoose]

However, you said you thought around £80 was a reasonable price for the upgrade where £110 isn't. It was possibly to get it for approximately that. I hope it will be again, and if at that time you still feel it is reasonable, great, if not, that's fine too.
As for three years of upgrades being costly, it only is if you decide to buy an upgrade every time your subscription runs out. If at the time it does new updates don't add anything you want, don't buy the upgrade. It doesn't stop you using what you already have. At the moment you don't think the upgrades have been worth the cost to you, that's fine, that's fair. The upgrade from 3.3 to 4 didn't add anything I wanted, but the current U-He promo did.
However, you were able to pick it up for about the £80 you did feel was a fair price, and I'm sorry you missed out.

[pdxindy]

disagree, it's a great deal on the daw market, if not the best. You don't have to upgrade just to have the latest version.

I also consider it a great deal... I always buy on sale. Calculating my cost over a few years now, it works out about $10 per month. At that rate, 20 years of ongoing Bitwig support and new features will be less than the synth I just bought. I consider the cost of Bitwig insignificant, especially considering the value I get from it.