Kraftur by Soundtheory, a multi band clipper

[foosnark]

Technically if i bought gullfoss 10Y ago and wanna sell it:
i pay:
10€ flat
+ 40% (72€) for first 4 (x10%) years
+ 30% (54€) for last 6 (x5%) years
that's 136€.
If I bought it full price (180€) that means that the cost I effectively pay soundtheory is 316€ in total.
If i want to SELL it, Soundtheory is basically charging me yearly subscription ON TOP of perpetual license.

The license thing is frankly stupid, but your math is wrong. If I buy a car for $20K, drive it for 3 years and its value depreciates by $10K, that doesn't mean it cost me $30K.

In reality, you're just not going to find someone willing to pay enough to make it worth reselling your license. Meanwhile that short-term user is probably going to be able to get some of their money back. You're not being robbed beyond the original price you paid, it's just that licenses gradually become effectively NFR, which... doesn't make any sense at all.

As for demos, well... this thread had me wanting to demo the Newfangled Audio one, but apparently I already did once, even though I don't remember doing it, and good ol' iLok doesn't want me to try it a second time. That's another great way to lose some potential business.

[psy dive]

Technically if i bought gullfoss 10Y ago..

Tell me ONE plugin you bought 10 years ago and are expecting to make a buck with by selling it today?

BTW Fruityloops also does advocate lifetime free updates but does not allow licence transfers at all. Nobody seems to have a problem with that. Quite the opposite actually.

It's sad to see some getting this vocal and insulting at something/someone they don't agree with or fail to understand completely.

"Do as i want and be done with it!"

KVR is going to KVR.. what did we expect?

Looking forward to some demos and trying this out myself.

All the best to the team!

[motomotomoto]

Just price it 199€ like Oeksound and be done with it.

please god no.

for the 95% of us who don't go buying plugins and trying to resell them willy nilly please keep the price affordable, and not inflate the upfront purchase price to facilitate that 5% who wants to participate in a buy / sell plugin marketplace.

[pekbro]

I dont sell plugins, i have traded them a couple times or given them away, thats
about it. I dont buy used gear either.
Living in Hawaii, makes it problematic,
but i prefer new anyway.

[Ploki]

Technically if i bought gullfoss 10Y ago and wanna sell it:
i pay:
10€ flat
+ 40% (72€) for first 4 (x10%) years
+ 30% (54€) for last 6 (x5%) years
that's 136€.
If I bought it full price (180€) that means that the cost I effectively pay soundtheory is 316€ in total.
If i want to SELL it, Soundtheory is basically charging me yearly subscription ON TOP of perpetual license.

The license thing is frankly stupid, but your math is wrong. If I buy a car for $20K, drive it for 3 years and its value depreciates by $10K, that doesn't mean it cost me $30K.

In reality, you're just not going to find someone willing to pay enough to make it worth reselling your license. Meanwhile that short-term user is probably going to be able to get some of their money back. You're not being robbed beyond the original price you paid, it's just that licenses gradually become effectively NFR, which... doesn't make any sense at all.

No my math ain't wrong at all.
This is akin to buying a car for 20$K, drive it for 3 years, and then the car manufacturer CHARGES YOU 10$K SO YOU CAN EVEN SELL IT.
And then you can charge 10$K for it.

So you bought your car for 20$K
you sell it for 10$K
now car manufacturer charges you 10$K.
Car manufacturer gets 10$K on top of your initial 20$K purchase, and you get shit.

You're left with no car and no money, you effectively GAVE. YOUR. CAR. AWAY.

Tell me ONE plugin you bought 10 years ago and are expecting to make a buck with by selling it today?

It's sad to see some getting this vocal and insulting at something/someone they don't agree with or fail to understand completely.

Doesn't matter it can be 3 years. I sold plenty of stuff after 3 years. After 3 years, the license transfer COST is 64€. That's more than any other vendor.

Also i haven't insulted anybody.
There isn't a single insult aimed towards anyone in any of my posts in this thread, so please refrain from mischaracterising me in such a demeaning manner

please god no.

for the 95% of us who don't go buying plugins and trying to resell them willy nilly please keep the price affordable, and not inflate the upfront purchase price to facilitate that 5% who wants to participate in a buy / sell plugin marketplace.

10% price increase isn't bad at all, i gladly pay 10% more for a decent policy.
I bought plenty of plugins from the market and then i bought from devs directly as well.

with such a stupid convoluted and predatory policy you might as well just say "we don't do transfers" and be done with it.

Also this: "Benefiting from RD" bullshit, by that logic you should charge 1$ more for every new license you sell because every new license holder is benefiting of the investment of earlier buyers. I should also get a new iPhone for free because i already bought a couple and invested into the RD.

Whatever

[plexuss]

One good reason to have customer-centric policies is to prevent botched product releases like this one. Some of these devs might be code-smart but lack business acumen in a way their ego's won't let them acknowledge. Result: lost revenue, lost customers and wasted time. Will they learn their lessons? Probably not. It's good consumers have many better alternatives.

[foosnark]

No my math ain't wrong at all.
This is akin to buying a car for 20$K, drive it for 3 years, and then the car manufacturer CHARGES YOU 10$K SO YOU CAN EVEN SELL IT.

OK, forget the car metaphor, cars aren't plugins. Let's keep it simple:

If your plugin costs 180 and you can resell it for 100 but they take a transfer fee of 20, you're still getting something back. This doesn't mean the plugin cost you 200! If they're taking a transfer fee of 80+, you just don't sell. The plugin still cost you 180, but it effectively has no resale value.

[hightyde]

Now, if you bought Gullfoss for our $99 introductory offer, you could now sell it for $199, because your license is just as good as a new license bought from us. So you would have used Gullfoss for six full years, received all the maintenance and would even have gained up to $100 by selling it. That doesn’t sound quite fair, neither to us developers nor to those customers who in fact payed for your time spent with the plugin and the money you made from it by selling it for more than you paid.

With all due respect but this is hogwash, there isn't a single person who is picking up a license on sale and then selling it for RRP years later because nobody is buying 2nd hand licenses at RRP

I totally agree with the above comment…. And even if they were “attempting” to sell it at RRP years later, no one would purchase it at that price anyway because it could easily be found for much less.

[Ploki]

OK, forget the car metaphor, cars aren't plugins. Let's keep it simple:

If your plugin costs 180 and you can resell it for 100 but they take a transfer fee of 20, you're still getting something back. This doesn't mean the plugin cost you 200! If they're taking a transfer fee of 80+, you just don't sell. The plugin still cost you 180, but it effectively has no resale value.

If they take a fee the total plugin cost for me was buy + whatever they charge for transfer fee tho? Of course i can decide not to sell, but then it’s the same as for companies that have no resale policy.
Why so many hoops to jump through?
if they deliberately make the fee much higher than the rest of the industry and at a point so high selling it just means you’re giving them extra cash for your license, they could just prohibit resale and call it a day.

For example, I bought it in 2018 and sold it in 2021 before the silly resale policy.
the value then was about idk 70 bucks?
If i had to pay by current fees i’d be practically giving it away.
Not 10 years - 3 years.
but the issue isn’t even that, the issue is that the company is trying to paint it as a service for their customers. Having a basically NFR license thinly veiled as resellable with some disguise of doing it for customers just looks bad.


And funny enough i sold it because i got TEOTE free with my Voxengo premium membership - somehow voxengo can operate, update in time and without wierd license transfer fees and still give new plugs to existing customers for free (not that i’d be pissed if new plugin cost something). His premium eula even says that new product MIGHT be free or not, and it’s actually NFR. Further more it also says previous single product can be marked as NFR - they weren’t, i could sell them for no fee.

I don’t mind. Just don’t take me for a fool.

[Caine123]

and people say ilok fees are bad

so i dont like transfer fees as well but i think e.g. ilok fees are ok overall, e.g. you pay the fee and nothing more. why they go another route is just bad policy and seems the company doesnt care. sales are good enough it seems.

[martinjuenke]

Far worse than strange transfer fee policies are "no transfer possible" policies from developers like UAD and others. Just sayin'...

[Caine123]

Far worse than strange transfer fee policies are "no transfer possible" policies from developers like UAD and others. Just sayin'...

yes or DMG, i still dunno how they got such a reputation. bad service, have no good experience with them at all.

[SNBeatz]

This is not really about an individual making a profit. Mentioning this is to exemplify the economical unsustainability of the situation and to point out that a devaluation of the license is necessary in order to assign a proper value to the received service. Using software comes with a practical value for the user. This value needs to be reflected in the economical value of the license. Without such an assignment the economics would favour abuse and punish the customer who does not take advantage of it. So this is not a problem of the individual, but of the group and the foundational relationship between service provider and customer which needs to be fairly weighing all legitimate interests against each other.

Something that seems to be not commonly understood regarding models with paid updates for devaluation of software licenses is that those are implicitly also a transfer fee. If you don't update your software, it loses resale value which has to be offset by either the seller or the buyer. This offset has exactly the same effect as a transfer fee. The only difference is that with the paid update model, you also need to pay if you just want to keep using the software.

Please think about it for a while and if you still feel the need for discussion afterwards, I'll be listening and be open-minded.

… received all the maintenance and would even have gained up to $100 by selling it. That doesn’t sound quite fair, neither to us developers…

If you want to sell your license, you pay a reasonable fee that prevents you from using the license transfer as an endless trial or even make a profit from selling a license that you purchased at a discount.

If you have a contract where one side, the developer in this case, goes all -in to make sure he delivers the best product with the best support and the other side can simply drop it at any time and get out after having taken advantage of the developer and the other customers investment, then that is not sutainable.

Like I said, I have no stake in this. I don’t care how you run your business, because it’s your business and we don’t yet live in a world where the audio plugin market has been completely cornered. But rhetoric like the above quotes, as some others have pointed out in more blunt terms than I have, comes off as passive blame shifting excuses for “innovating” a new tactic to drive all sales involving your products directly to you as the developer. Again, that is a fine thing to do, but just be prepared the reaction when customers read the fine print and catch on.

Plenty of companies name their price and policies, stand firm, and move on. As an example, without name dropping, I bought a couple high quality plugins at $50 a piece for a total $100 “investment”. On my Windows-based machine I haven’t had any hiccups or hangs for over 2 years without updating, and none of the updates offered to me thus far have been paid. Here is their stated policy: License transfers: If you purchased this product you may transfer your license to another person. As the original owner you are required to initiate the transfer through the user account system on the *** website, so that the new owner can receive the updates and support attached to the license. Upon transferring a license, the original owner must remove any copies from their machines and are no longer permitted to use the software. Is this a bad business move? I have no idea, because I’m not a business major. But will I continue to purchase their products if they continue to operate this way? Sure.

How would you feel as a customer knowing that someone else used that same product and sold it without any loss after many years while you did not and therefore funded part of the development that he took advantage of.

I honestly would not care whatsoever. My investment in your product is just that, a simple transaction where you make money and I receive a tool. I’m not getting shares in the company, I don’t get a seat at the decision-making table. Yet again, operate however you see fit, but I don’t recommend making bold assumptions about how your customers would or wouldn’t feel about how other people gain access to your products. Many of us really do not care or even think about that, like at all.

[bmanic]

Far worse than strange transfer fee policies are "no transfer possible" policies from developers like UAD and others. Just sayin'...

yes or DMG, i still dunno how they got such a reputation. bad service, have no good experience with them at all.

DMG Audio does allow transfers, but only once. When a plugin is transferred it becomes NFR meaning there can be no more transferring it. Only an original purchase from their shop allows for a transfer. A second hand purchase does not allow it.

[bmanic]

Far worse than strange transfer fee policies are "no transfer possible" policies from developers like UAD and others. Just sayin'...

Agreed. And it should be illegal at least in the EU. Not sure if anybody has actually fought this in a court of law yet.