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,
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.
MSE said:$650 to upgrade my already paid for software is not an upgrade it's a replacement.
Corel is not offering to upgrade your "paid for software" for $650.
What they are offering is ~$500 to start from scratch, with the option of spending an additional ~$150 pretty much up front to buy one year of "upgrade protection" - to a large extent "paying in advance" for an upgrade to the next version.
The upgrade protection is a subscription service, so as long as you keep paying ~$150 per year, you continue to ride on the "upgrade train". Cancel that subscription - stop paying - and your perpetual license is still valid, at the most recent version to which you had upgraded before "stepping off the train".
This weird combination of perpetual-license-with-ongoing-subscription-for-upgrading is really confusing to a lot of users, and I understand why many people don't like it even if they do fully understand it. Back in the day, they could sit out a few version upgrades, and then upgrade a license to the latest version at a modest cost when they thought it was worth it. Of course people liked that; it was much less expensive per year than current options.
You can vote with your wallet, and make some effort to let Corel know why they are losing you as a customer.
Yeah, well I'm not starting from scratch, I've had my software for years. And the fact that they decided not to support their existing customers anymore is a shame, but they should have given us some advanced warning before sunsetting our software.
Corel gave months worth of warnings, back when they were ending upgrades for existing perpetual CorelDRAW licenses. That's when they were offering a CorelDRAW upgrade for $199 plus the $99 fee to get on board with upgrade protection. Now customers have to buy the full $499 version to access a $149 per year upgrade protection plan.
I think the bean counters running some of these software companies have delusions of grandeur. They've seen the success Adobe had taking their gamble with subscription-only software. Adobe's stock price in June of 2013 was around $45 per share. Now it's over $660 per share. These other software companies (such as Corel) are not equals to Adobe. None of them have the kind of leverage Adobe has on the graphics software market. Autodesk is the only other company that comes close due to how much of the 3D and CAD market they have cornered. Autodesk has gone with the subscription route too, a pretty expensive version of it.
The only thing I can see Corel accomplishing by trying to copy Adobe's licensing model is price-squeezing its existing users and then watching that customer base slowly erode. Higher costs combined with declining product quality doesn't go over well with existing users and sure isn't going to attract new users.
Actually for those paying attention Corel gave a notice years ago. I've been on auto upgrade or upgrade protection or whatever it's called for years.
David, unfortunately they've now done away with UPP and they did NOT give any notice of that.
Here are the two sites I got my information from:https://www.corel.com/en/upp-terms/ https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/subscription-support/faq/
That has to bite! I was paying attention and jumped because at that time the price was less than buying the software. With that package you still by the software and have an installer.