I just received an email that informed me that my CorelDraw Suite monthly subscription has almost TRIPLED!
I thought this must surely be in error and went to Coreldraw.com to see the latest pricing... has Corel gone bonkers? Are they actually TRYING to drive people towards Adobe products?
Both the once-off and subscription prices have escalated enormously. I don't think I'll be able to justify using Corel over Adobe to the boss anymore, especially after the v2019 fiasco where we literally found the software useless and a danger to productivity due to all the bugs...
Shouldn't Corel Corp be mending fences instead of burning bridges?
You have to get on a plan where the subscription is billed annually. They have a new "monthly" subscription plan which costs a whopping $34.95. That comes out to nearly $420 per year. It would be insane for anyone to pay that over a year or more on a month by month basis.The normal subscription plan price has been hiked up $51 from the original $198 rate to $249. In monthly terms that translates to a jump from $16.50 to $20.75, a $4.25 increase. Again, to get the current $249 per year rate you have to pay the full year worth in one lump sum.I have version CorelDRAW 2020, but still use v2018 at work and X8 at home due to some technical problems with v2020. The older versions frequently have opening page ads when the program is launched and pop-up ads when they're closed to pitch buying v2020. I was pretty shocked the first time I saw the $34.95 subscription price. The first ads said nothing about it being a month to month rate with no yearly commitment.Even under a "normal" $249 per year rate that comes out to paying the equivalent of buying a full version of CorelDRAW graphics suite every 2 years. That's pretty steep. It cost a good bit extra up front, but over the long term the $99 per year "upgrade protection" thing Corel offered perpetual license users will end up saving a good bit of money. IMHO the $99 per year rate is what Corel should be offering if they want to attract new users. That pricing is equivalent to the previous 2-year upgrade cycle Corel previously had years ago.
The price is not the issue, the issues are any update or any new feature 85% chance it will not work properly, 95% chance it will never get fixed!
First of all, pricing is the topic of this thread. Pricing is 100% relevant in this specific discussion. Bugs and features have been discussed in many other threads. No need for thread drift here.
Second, the issue of pricing does not somehow cancel out the issue of bugs. It is actually possible for multiple problems and issues to exist with a piece of commercially sold software. It is possible for the software to be BOTH buggy and overpriced. Further, any company selling software to the public should be able to address more than one issue at a time in parallel. If they can't do that then they shouldn't be in business in the first place.
I personally don't use dollar bills as toilet paper. Money does have value to me. I certainly don't like paying a lot more for the same product.
Years ago CorelDRAW had a roughly 2-year release cycle with upgrades typically costing a little under $200. When they moved to a yearly release schedule they kept the upgrade price the same, which effectively doubled the prices for people staying current with their CorelDRAW licenses. Worse yet, the amount of improvements and new features in the yearly upgrades was considerably less than the versions introduced in 2 year cycles. Making things even worse than that, the yearly schedule made bugs far more likely thanks to the reduced testing schedule. Corel was charging a lot more money while delivering far less value. The new policy only encouraged many existing CorelDRAW users to stick with the older versions they were using and only buy upgrades in a sporadic manner.
Of course the latest chapter is Corel effectively going the subscription-only route, doing away with traditional perpetual licenses and upgrades. Great way to get back at the users for skipping versions and holding off on upgrade purchases.Long time CorelDRAW users were given the opportunity to pay $298 up front to get into the upgrade protection program to then be able to pay $99 per year to get back to the cost structure that existed years ago. The choice was either do that or let one's perpetual license go dead. Now Corel sells $34.95 per month or $249 per year subscriptions, or one can pay $499 for a non-upgrade-able version. That pricing model is going to turn away many potential new CorelDRAW customers. Technical problems with the software will also turn away customers as well.
If CorelDRAW worked to a much higher degree of reliability, (allot fewer bugs and poor design features eliminated, read the object manager and keep desktop objects on layer as 2 of many examples) it would not be over priced.
A new license is about $10 a week, on the upgrade it's about $5 a week, not that bad IF IT WORKED .
To get what a print, sign and image graphics person needs from Adobe is AI, PS and ID at their best price is $635.88 a year, nomupgrade discount. The CorelDRAW Graphics suite for a new license is $100 less and 40% of Adobes cost at upgrade prices.
If you think that's too much money for professional work I don't get your complaint, hell one print head for my inkjet is $850.
Corel cannot make enough money from so-called professionals. Few software houses can. They need to sell to the more common person.
To match the CD "suite," one needs a single subscription to AI + the photography bundle (PS + Lightroom). I can obtain AI for $19/month and PS for $10/month. So basically $360/year.
It's not about Corel producing some mythical version that had few bugs and stopped mucking about with existing features and workflows. What the Corel investors are doing with pricing isn't sustainable.
You also need InDesign, many Draw users create 50+ page documents. If Adobe can make money from professionals so can Corel.
However the software needs to be professional! Adobes best price for those 3 applications is $599.88 a year U.S. (every year). From their web site
www.adobe.com/.../plans.html buy
In round dollars Corels price is $500 U.S. the first year and $250 upgrade there after.
I agree that what Corel is doing is unsustainable not because of price but because the software is so buggy and new features are so few and far between then poorly implemented and never fixed.
I have a vender who ask me how I got away with charging twice what she does for prints and a good deal more for electric signs, I told her my clients lay the price because I was better at providing the service and I am. My color control is vastly superior, as is my image editing, customer communication and project management. So people are willing to pay more. On projects the improved management saves them money.
If you're in the graphics profession and you can't afford $5 a week maybe a different job is what's needed. To solve Corels problem product and then marketing improvement is what's needed.
David, the focus here is on Corel. Not Adobe or any other software company. Bringing Adobe into the discussion for a bit of what-about-ism rings hollow. It's an apples to oranges comparison; CorelDRAW Graphics Suite is not an equivalent to a full membership of Adobe Creative Cloud.
Here's the big question: what did Corel do to improve CorelDRAW to justify effectively doubling its prices? We're not talking about any other companies, we're only talking about what Corel. What new features or improvements did they bring to the table to justify doubling the price of their product? A few years ago, in the 2 year product cycle, keeping a CorelDRAW license current averaged out to about $99 per year or maybe a few dollars less. Now that yearly cost is up to $250.
The comment, "if you're in the graphics profession and you can't afford $5 a week maybe a different job is what's needed," is another lame way of ignoring the point. No one likes seeing the price doubled for anything, be it cup of coffee, gallon of gasoline or some computer software. Yeah, we have some expensive, industry-specific software at my workplace, stuff that costs a lot more than a copy of CorelDRAW or even an Adobe Master Collection box. Expensive as those applications may be, none of them are costing double what they did just a few years ago.
Bobby Henderson said:A few years ago, in the 2 year product cycle, keeping a CorelDRAW license current averaged out to about $99 per year or maybe a few dollars less. Now that yearly cost is up to $250.
I'm in the U.S. I just checked now, and they show Upgrade Protection as being $149/year.
That offer only applies to new users who spend $499 for a full version and then add $149 per year on top of that. It doesn’t apply to users of older perpetual license copies of CorelDRAW. They’re stuck with the $249 subscription option or just keep using the software they have. In January the $99 per year offer (in addition to spending $199 for the CDR 2019 upgrade) was sunsetted along with traditional perpetual license upgrades. The $499 full version offer has been a non-upgrade-able version for some time. The $149 upgrade protection offer appears to be a new thing.
Actually if you comprehend what I posted I agree with you, the price of CorelDRAW is not justified by the quality of the product.
However one cannot ignore that many graphic file creators are incredibly cheap and in many cases for many years they've been plain out thieves, bootlegging software and using cracks.
The issues are, Corel cannot program for an ICC, Postscript/PDF, Device N and GDI compliant application that supports live transparency for Affinity prices or $175 a year per user.
A creator in a diverse graphics market, meaning they produce files for web, print, image, wide/grand format and the manufacture signs are going to have CorelDRAW and or Adobe, they may have some dedicated applications but they will have one or both of those two.
A user only doing images may only have GIMP, a sign guy may only have Flexi but a diverse business can't get by without Core or Adobe, they are the only real options in a diverse environment.
That's the world we live in so we all must suck it up.
It sounded like you were in support of Corel's price hikes in principal, but only with exception the price hikes aren't currently justified due to the bugs in the software.
My problems with Corel's current pricing of CorelDRAW goes beyond just the bugs. Fundamentally they just don't have the development team in place to be able to pull off a product cycle only 12 months in length. If CorelDRAW was on its previous 2 year product cycle the developers would have more time to root out bugs and stability issues. They would have more time to accumulate new or improved features in the software. That would make new version releases more appealing to existing customers. Instead, they're doing yearly upgrades with very minor, even yawn-inducing improvements, if not actually taking a step backward due to introducing new bugs. And they're charging considerably more for it.
By the way, Corel has never charged "Affinity level pricing" for its software.
Regarding unethical users who pirate software, that's a whole other topic. Honest users such as myself don't really like it if we feel we are being taxed due to the dishonesty of others. But many of those people who use pirated software were never going to buy legit copies anyway. A bunch of them are self-taught, wannabe graphic designers or nerds who acquire pirated applications just to be able to brag that they have it in their collection. They don't even use it. It's like the guy who owns an expensive electric guitar but can't play it at all. There may be a decent number of people doing paid graphics work using illegal software, but I would be willing to bet they're in the minority of piracy users. It's really pretty stupid for anyone to try using pirated software in an actual production environment due to all the hazards baked into it. Often the stuff is put online as bait in order to proliferate malware.
As for the group of people who have to "suck it up," and live with whatever terms Corel dictates to them, that's not really a very large group of people. It's a select group of existing CorelDRAW customers. Many other users are free to jump to other alternatives. Corel sure can't survive alone just on business it gets from niche categories like the sign industry. CorelDRAW also has to appeal to more general purpose graphics customers.