Pricing and new features

I’ve been subscribing for 2 years and have been loving it. I’ve been struggling to like parametric feature. I understand that all this development comes at a cost, I wish I didn’t have to pay for it tho, as I don’t need it nor do I like it. Yes I know I can just hide sketches.

I wish there was a subscription for those that don’t want this new feature at the old price.

I also want to point out that $500 Australian converts to $332 USD so we are paying more here for some reason.

My last payment was $239 USD and now it’s almost $100 more. (Maybe I got a discount, not sure) I can just see a significant price increase every year.

My renewal has bounced as I can’t afford the new price right now.

I can see that this an industry wide phenomenon. Hobbyists are getting pushed out as software companies are trying to charge higher and higher fees. Possibly justified as new features are added but maybe there could be a way to have tiers. And I’m not talking about restricting necessary things to make life hard, just not providing advanced features for a lower price.

It makes no financial sense to maintain two sets of code. Shapr is not a large company, so they have limited resources.

As someone who has had to maintain three or more major versions of a software set simultaneously, making sure changes get rolled into newer versions and not rolled back to older versions, I can tell you it can be a nightmare.

Forgive my ignorance, I’m not a programmer, know nothing about code, and overall just not great with new technology. Could you explain further why this is so? or at least explain why this would be maintaining multiple sets of code?

I was always under the, perhaps naive, assumption that tiered systems were the same source code, just with more features added/enabled in the upper tiers. Or essentially, in the example of Shapr, the basic code for direct modeling would be the lowest and new features for HBPM are only available to subsequent tiers. That way it’s not necessarily changing the codes individually for update rollouts, they would only apply to the higher tiers? and the only time the basic code tier is changed is when features that have been tested can be easily applied to that particular code.

The HBPM seems more of a fundamental code shift of the basic code. I also assume that’s why there is much frustration with it. Is that why you say Shapr can’t offer tiers?

I suspect it’s actually more of a shift than you think. Just the act of linking sketches to bodies created from them likely took some major coding. It’s not cost effective to maintain one set of code for disconnected sketches and a separate set of code for connected sketches. Every time you added a new feature to one, adding it to the other would likely break something, greatly increasing the necessary testing time, and time is money. The only reasonable alternative would be to run a collapse operation every time you added a step. You think things are slow now, just think how slow they’d be then. I’m guessing what the collapse operation is doing internally is simply exporting the project in X_T format and then reimporting it.

So with the old designs where it didn’t record the history. I can go and delete any sketches and the bodies remain intact. I feel like it could be turned off in most instances as all my old models still work fine.

It sounds like it’s here to stay so just need to get used to it.

Well, now [14th November 2024] it’s £39.99/month or $50/month.
This is total insanity?
A few weeks ago, it was £21/month. I was just about to sign up and then I see it’s gone up by £18/month. I was debating whether to subscribe at £21/month.
Well, now, at least, I don’t need to decide.
This price is crazy, considering Adobe CC is £49/month for at least 20 different apps, including the world famous Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & Acrobat.
What a shame.
I will just stick with the free version.