Category: Subscription

Subscription Discounts – Not the Deal You Think

10 Jun 2019 Darren Young

Autodesk has always offered software discounts. There’s typically always a promotion running that your reseller can ell you all about.

Back in the day, discounts made sense. Software was sold as a perpetual license with a high upfront cost. It didn’t matter if you needed the software next week or 10 months from now. You always had that large, upfront cost. With this pricing model, it typically made sense to but before you needed to get a discount. This was particularly helpful during the end of Autodesk’s Quarter or their Fiscal Year End (Jan 31).

Subscription Changes Everything

Since Autodesk moved to a subscription pricing model, software discounts…”The Deal”…is in large part irrelevant now. With subscription software, there is no large upfront cost. You pay an annual fee. You can also prorate your purchase so it expires and renews with all your other Autodesk software.

To put in another way, in the old days, if you needed an additional license 6 months from now, you’d still pay the entire full price…leveraging the discount saved you money. With a subscription, if you don’t need your license for 6 months, you can buy it prorated so it’s 1/2 the cost. At 50% price to buy for the last half of a year, it makes no sense to but early to get only a 20% discount.

When Does a Discount Make Sense

To better understand when a discount makes sense, I’ve put together a spreadsheet listing full price and discount price of several different products. The below image shows the cost breakdown between various packages with and without as discount. Looking at a 1-Year subscription term…

We add the discount in cell A2. Here its 20%, which is what a recent Autodesk promotion offered.

Looking at the last row (Row 17) this lists the maximum number of months you can sit in your license without using it before you loose money with the discount. In this example, if you don’t use your software for more than 3 months, you’ve lost money using the discount.

Row 18 shows the inverse. It shows the minimum number of months of usage you need to save money. Again, in this example, 9 months.

So, a 20% discount, your 12 month breakdown in 3/9. For a 3-Year term (not shown) the breakdown for 36 months is 8/28. If you don’t stat using your software within 8 months, you’re going to loose money on the discount.

If you want to do your own analysis, I’ve attached the spreadsheet below. It contains a tab for 1-Year and 3-Year Subscription terms. Simply enter the discount in Cell A2. You can also update with your own products that you may use however, it really doesn’t matter the product or cost, the saving/cost breakdown is the same.

Subscription-Discount-CalculatorDownload

Autodesk Concurrent Usage Restriction

3 Apr 2018 Darren Young

A couple months ago I posted about a “business rule” Autodesk had which restricted a user from using more that 2 titles of their Collection on the same computer at the same time. The original post can be read here. This wasn’t a technical limitation rather a legal restriction. The “rule” essentially stated that you couldn’t run more than 2 products at the same time for the same user on the same computer. This would be like Microsoft saying you couldn’t use Email, Word and Excel all at the same time. I asked several trusted Autodesk resellers, my Autodesk insiders and other industry peers and it seems this restriction wasn’t very well known, In fact, not a single person I asked was aware of the “rule”

Back in January when I first raised the issue, I was in the middle of a contract renewal and it was Autodesk’s fiscal year end. As a result, there were several Autodesk regional reps raising the issue internally at Autodesk. I had hints back then (unofficially) that they were reassessing the policy and would likely remove the restriction. I’m now happy to report that as of March 29th, the policy restriction has been officially removed.

It was reported in the “Moving to Subscription” forum as a followup to my initial complaints and concerns. You can read the entire forum thread here.

If you look at Autodesk’s Collection Licensing support article here, you can see the restriction struck through and updated.

I’m a tough critic of Autodesk’s policies and their sales practices. But I have to admit, this was fairly quick action on their part considering their legal team was likely involved. They historically haven’t made concessions based on customer pressure very often and when they have, it sometimes comes very slow. In the use case I gave them, I discussed how an MEP firm running Fabrication CADmep would need 3 licenses, One license of CADmep, one for the AutoCAD session it was running on and Navis.

The feedback I received through resellers pushing their Autodesk partner managers for answers came back quickly in mid-January exactly how many users globally fell into that scenario. I was impressed how quickly they started analyzing the scope and impact to their company and users. Hats off to Autodesk for squashing this ridiculous rule. For the first time in over 25 years of dealing with Autodesk, their sales and legal teams came together and did the right thing.