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.
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.
$4.79 a week, $249 a year U.S. is not expensive for creative/production software, a smart business person could buy a new license every 3 cycles and reduce costs. Why not it's not like we're regularly getting any serious improvements. As an example for my 46th anniversary I took 10 of us out for dinner and drinks, the bill with tip was just under $600, it's the world we live in. Other examples are too numerous to list but in round numbers my architectural clients software costs average $4,000 U.S. per creative workstation.
The real cost of 2019 and 2020 is in lost productivity. If I listed bugs, broken code during the 2019 recoding, with 2020 barely a reasonable service pack 1 for 2019, poorly implemented new features and legacy bugs and poorly designed GUI this post would scroll FOREVER!
Corel has to plot a course in one direction or another, they've priced their product like a professional product and for the last few cycles programmed it like a hobbyists product ignoring professional features.
Many features are keyed toward the single user system making the suite a poor choice for the IT supported multi multi user corporate environment. That's fine if they sell for Affinity prices.
I need full professionally compliant software supporting Device N transparency and I have no problem paying for it but dealing with programming on the cheap ifor the non multi user environment s not going to sell me or my clients any software in the near future.