Over the last 25 years I've spent thousands of dollars on Corel software and now they have decided not to allow me to upgrade anymore. They decided I should rent their software instead, I don't rent software, ask Adobe I quit their software for the same reason. Does anyone know another software package?
What do you do?
The work I do can only be done in Adobe or Corel so it is what it is. However there many things people do that can be done with other software.
In reality all you ever do is rent software, you buy it, time passes and it will no longer run on current systems, I bought a $2,750 software package that was sold as a lifetime license. Seven years later I got the screw you notice, pay another $3,500 or stop using the software.
Life's a bit#h, what are you supposed to do, give up your business over $500?
I'm a lead software engineer, I do a lot of websites and screen designs. I know software is not going to last forever but I bought the 2020 version of all their software now one year later I can't upgrade it. I have their full line of software so I have to find replacements for all of them,
I use, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2021, AftetShot Pro 3 and PaintShop Pro 2021 and update every new version. My accounting software, my company database software and color management software each are 5 to 10 times the cost of all my Corel software combined.
I'm helping a client replace their estimating software because it's $350 a month for the server software and 2 satellite users.
I stopped getting Designer as what it did for me was not that important. However I jumped on the low cost upgrade protection Corel offered years ago and it has saved me a few bucks. AfterShot Pro and PaintShop Pro are priced low.
RIP software is much worse than graphics applications it locks you in not only to their software but many times into a computer system and hardware that can't be upgraded. Imagine that at $7,000 to $50,000 depending on the RIP.
I consulted to a printer that paid $3,000 a month for 5 years for his prepress, digital front end and plate setter that was obsolete before he signed the contract to lease it. Then if they wanted to update their computer systems they were forced to buy them from the manufacturer at over $6,000 per system or not be eligible for support. Within the 5 years all the gear was obsolete.
Now let's wonder why the graphics industry is in trouble.
Corel has done a really terrible job making the purchase options clear to customers who want to buy a copy of CorelDRAW. It's either that or they've been trying to obscure the fact that all of the buying options are pretty crummy.
The "upgrade protection" option is almost hidden in the sales pitch for the full $499 one-time-purchase version. Customers merely buy the $499 version and then make a few assumptions. One guess is that full $499 version can't be upgraded at all, which isn't 100% accurate. The other guess, a common one, is that the full version can be upgraded to the next version release since that's how most perpetual license software is sold. That's not how it works either.
Currently, in order to buy the full version of CorelDRAW and be able to upgrade it later you have to pay $499 up front PLUS another $149 up front for "upgrade protection." That's nearly $650 up front. And then the following January when the new version is released you get to pay another $149 to download the new version and continue that upgrade protection plan. In the space of a few months a CorelDRAW customer can blow nearly $800 just keeping a license current. I don't think that pricing model is by accident. When adding up that total cost it makes the $249 per year subscription price not seem quite so bad. If you buy the full $499 version and opt-in for the "upgrade protection" plan you would have to be on that plan for 4 years before you started seeing any savings at all over the purely subscription version.
$249 per year isn't as steep as the roughly $650 annual cost to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud. On the other hand, the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite really has only two real full-blown applications: Draw and PhotoPaint. All the other apps, such as the Font Manager, are just applets. Nearly $250 per year for just two real applications is pretty steep on its own. That's $125 per application, which works out to a more expensive per-app price than Adobe Creative Cloud.
And then there is the sheer lack of application development and maintenance taking place. Years ago Corel was struggling to flesh out new product generations of CorelDRAW when it was on a 2 year development cycle. Now that full version upgrades are happening yearly the level of features and improvements being introduced is really pretty weak. We're 9 months into the 2021 product cycle and CorelDRAW 2021 has received only 1 update. When factoring in those issues that $249 per year subscription cost feels like a rip-off.
I'm pretty worried about the future of CorelDRAW. The executives at Corel (and higher ups at KKR) really need to take an honestly objective look at the situation and make very serious adjustments. If they stick to their guns with this current business model CorelDRAW won't survive any longer than a couple or so more version releases.
$650 to upgrade my already paid for software is not an upgrade it's a replacement. I've been with Corel from version 1.0 but I guess this is where we part.