Tal J-8

[egbert101]

No, the fault is a company selling licenses when they had none to sell, that is on Audiodeluxe.

[becseigy]

No, the fault is a company selling licenses when they had none to sell, that is on Audiodeluxe.

OK, I'm not authorized to do so, but I'll post Patrick's letter: (no other comment)

Hello

Thanks for the feedback. That's so true. We apologize for the whole
mess. We never wanted that deal and we never had such a deal in the
past. A 87% discount makes no sense for our company and damages our
image. Here is the truth about this:

We misread an email and accidentally accepted the ridiculous 87%
discount deal we never wanted. Planned was a 13% deal. A huge mistake
on our side. This can happen once in 12 years business when you
receive discount requests all the time. We noticed the mistake when
the distributor asked for more activation keys. They already sold a
lot of keys in a short time. We had to accept that we lost a lot of
money. To minimize the damage, we had to stop the discount and didn't
deliver any activation keys anymore. We also notified all parties.
Everyone that knows our company noticed that something went wrong and
did understand that decision.
Our business model does not work with such a high discount. Our
products have long lifetimes, some already over 12 years. We want to
offer good support for the users also in the future. We can't do this
if we earn 4$ for a lifetime license. 60$ is already a very-low
product price. It is also unfair for people that paid the full-price.
Their shop continued to sell more licenses even though TAL didn't
deliver any keys anymore and already stopped the discount. We do not
take any responsibility for licenses sold after the keys were sold
out. Keys people already received stay valid.

Best regards,
Patrick Kunz
TAL Software GmbH

[becseigy]

based on the above, I think that AD is completely innocent, and even tries to compensate (although it is not the company's business)

[egbert101]

Their shop continued to sell more licenses even though TAL didn't
deliver any keys anymore and already stopped the discount.

Exactly. There was no need to publish that email, it confirms what I already stated.

based on the above, I think that AD is completely innocent, and even tries to compensate (although it is not the company's business)

I think your opinion does not agree with the facts given.

[becseigy]

I think your opinion does not agree with the facts given.

Read again:
" A huge mistake on our side." They accepted the AD's deal, but since a lot of licenses would have to be given, they are already withdrawing.
Shitty thing.
But worst of all, silent listening instead of coming out with an announcement and blaming it all on AD.

[elassi]

Placing a cancelled order: 13$
Earned AD credits: 5$
Learned a lesson for life: priceless

[Niowiad]

So basically... AudioDeluxe had an agreement with TAL to sell (a supposedly unlimited amount of) discounted licenses for the entire duration of the sale as they're doing with all other companies, and they sold those licenses for a very short time-window until they realized TAL pulled out because they misred the deal and thought it was -13% instead of -87%.

Therefore it's TAL's fault, as they also admitted.
And I say this as someone who's much more inclined to support TAL over AudioDeluxe.

That said, I keep my position and still think "mistakes can happen".
I don't feel like being too hard on TAL because it was quite objectively a disastrous deal they misinterpreted.
And I definitely don't feel like blaming AudioDeluxe because they thought TAL agreed, and they stopped selling licenses as soon as they found out, immediately removing the plugins from the website.

I can see neither party being ill-intentioned, althought I wouldn't be too surprised if AudioDeluxe were pissed at TAL.
I'll keep buying from TAL if good plugins keep coming, and from AudioDeluxe if good offers are coming.

[Jac459]

Placing a cancelled order: 13$
Earned AD credits: 5$
Learned a lesson for life: priceless

I agree.
And I agree with TAL email, it was very obvious that the price was a mistake and people tried to take opportunity of it but shouldn't be furious that they couldn't do it at the end.

The French law is working like that by the way as I already said. If you put a price tag to an object, you are forced to sell it at this price EXCEPT if the price tag is obviously wrong (like 50% off for example). Here it was 87% off... Common...

[becseigy]

I think mistakes can happen.
The pricing was not exorbitant, it is not uncommon in this industry to have -90% pricing.
Nevertheless, OK, everyone can make mistakes.

What really annoys me is the behavior of TAL.
Instead of saying (in a statement, website, twitter etc), sorry, we f**ked up. No, just silence, and the response to the inquiry on X is "you'll hear from AD." . They point to AD.
Wouldn't it have been fair if TAL had stood up to AD, said sorry we f**ked up, and announced a 13% promotion on TAL website (as they originally thought).

No that didn't happen, so everyone started blaming AD, when TAL is the biggest culprit, just sneakily backing down.

And no, after that, thank you, I won't need a TAL-plugin, not even for free.

[egbert101]

I haven't checked, but I think those who placed orders had to play a charge (maybe I'm wrong) with paypal. And so customers actually lost money. I don't really care about imaginary credits from a company I won't do business with.

Also, I'm not at all furious, I actually feel everyone lost, and that's no fault of the customers, but it does firmly rest on the actions of Audiodeluxe.

[becseigy]

I haven't checked, but I think those who placed orders had to play a charge (maybe I'm wrong) with paypal. And so customers actually lost money.

I paid with paypal and they refunded the same amount.
One thing you can lose is the exchange rate conversion if USD is not your default currency.
There is no additional charge for the purchase as far as I know.
(it may be different for others)

[db3]

Deep discounting is certainly not uncommon and could have been limited to a specific number of licences. TAL is in the wrong if the response posted is genuine and could have honoured serials purchased before items were withdrawn from sale (as long as AD withdraw them at the earliest opportunity). The way this played out leaves a bad taste.

[mi-os]

So let's see. Audiodeluxe was planning a ridiculous 13% sale which only works for companies who have overinflated prices. Inviting TAL, which has a totally different pricing structure, to something like this was a stupid idea to begin with. I can very well understand how TAL couldn't imagine they actually meant 13% from the regular price and not just 13% off. I'd say thanks for nothing Audiodeluxe. Everybody angry with TAL should really rethink what happend.

[Dazd_N_Confuzd]

Paid €9.80 for J-8 and got refunded €9.26. So I paid 54 cent to be in with the chance of getting a plugin at a price that I deep down believed was too good to be true. I'm ok with that.

[Niowiad]

I think mistakes can happen.
The pricing was not exorbitant, it is not uncommon in this industry to have -90% pricing.
Nevertheless, OK, everyone can make mistakes.

What really annoys me is the behavior of TAL.
Instead of saying (in a statement, website, twitter etc), sorry, we f**ked up. No, just silence, and the response to the inquiry on X is "you'll hear from AD." . They point to AD.
Wouldn't it have been fair if TAL had stood up to AD, said sorry we f**ked up, and announced a 13% promotion on TAL website (as they originally thought).

No that didn't happen, so everyone started blaming AD, when TAL is the biggest culprit, just sneakily backing down.

And no, after that, thank you, I won't need a TAL-plugin, not even for free.

I agree that TAL should have come up with some explanations sooner.

About the extreme discounts part, I don't know...
Some companies make those extreme discounts part of their business model and keep their balance on that.
TAL keep their balance at around -20%. Suddently selling *by mistake* a scary amount of licenses at -87% (and also counting the reseller cut) right before their BF sale, sounds pretty damaging to their business.