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!
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.
Bobby Henderson said: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.
I don't think I ever made any claim that anything applied in some special way to users of older perpetual license copies of CorelDRAW.
Corel could make special offers to those users - and they did, for a while, with their "Upgrades are Ending!" campaign. Whether Corel make special offers available to such users in the future is up to them.
Upgrade Protection has been offered by CorelDRAW for a while, and has been one of the answers to the question, "How to always have a perpetual license to the current version of CorelDRAW?" It was of course a better deal at $99/year than it is at $149/year!
I understand all of the other baggage that goes along with Upgrade Protection, and I understand how distasteful the idea is to some users.