Update Plan Renewal

1

I’m curious, is anyone else surprised to receive a request for hundreds of dollars to ‘renew an update plan?’ Currently, for just a portion of the plug-ins I’ve already paid for, the amount requested in over $180. Somehow I missed this particular portion of the Waves “Terms & Conditions.”

Thanks, in advance, for any guidance from this group.

Pete

2

HI @PWT,

When you purchase a Waves product you get a permanent authorization for the version you purchased and you also get one year of the Waves Update Plan from the date of the license registration. The Waves Update Plan covers you for any OS or DAW updates, support or additional plugins that may be added to the license. At the end of the one year of Waves Update Plan, you have the option to renew but it’s not necessary to keep using the version you own.

The Waves Update Plan is a platform that enables users to have support and the latest updates supporting platforms that are current and new on the market. Waves invests 100’s of man-hours in order to be able to support as many platforms and third company version updates as possible and the Waves Update Plan allows us to continue this development for our users.

This insures you that when you buy Waves and a new release comes out within the next year you will get it at no additional cost. Some software companies handle this using a grandfather clause of 3 months, saying that if you buy a product and a newer version comes out right away you will get it as well for free. Waves has extended this to one automatic year.

This also was used for the purpose of allowing people to know exactly how much their updates are going to be so they can budget for them. Software is updated so quickly and updates can come out unexpectedly all the time, causing unexpected fees. The Waves Update Plan lets you know your covered for any update that might come out and let’s you know exactly when the next update will be and how much it will cost.

As you will see with other plugin companies, they only offer Tech Support through e-mail, or they have limited support of all the major host applications and architectures. Waves leads the way with top line support, wide compatibility, large growing product line, and new free products all for a percentage of the cost of your original purchase.
More Information about the Waves Update Plan can be found here.

3

Thank you Yishai-Waves! This is exactly what I’ve been looking for, an explanation of the difference between the Update Plan and the Upgrade Path. Your replay makes it SO very clear! Again, thank you!

4

The way I describe it to people is that EVERY developer asks for money to keep your plugins “maintained” and bug free. Every time another developer releases a new version of a plugin you’re paying for the next year or so of maintenance. You do also get new features with it, but you’re also paying more, generally $150 or so.

Whereas to update a Waves plugin its generally between $10-30, capping at around $240. So its way, way cheaper, but that makes sense as you’re not paying for new features.

Waves seems to separate their update maintenance from their new features. I don’t actually know why they’ve chosen to do it this way, but my educated guess is to ensure that their older plugins will still open in 20 year old projects which is a feature many industry heavyweights still appreciate. Nothing breaks a plugin like adding new features. Except maybe a DAW or an OS update.

Generally their “new features” come in the form of a new plugin, which you can generally pick up on sale for $30. So that, plus WUP would be $60 all up. Still cheaper than what other devs ask for.

5

Good post, a lot of stuff in here i did not know about :smiley:

1 Like
6

Hey Yishai - please excuse some ignorance on my part as this is literally my first time using a forum of any kind.

In September I updated my computer to Sequoia, and up until a few days ago, ALL my plugins worked through waves.

I had not opened, nor updated waves central.

Recently I needed to set up CueRec to use with a DLive in a live setting. I opened waves central, it asked to update, I skipped. ALL my plugins still worked for weeks.

Weeks later, no changes to my computer, all auto updates are off, I update waves central to connect to the DLive. Suddenly, ALL my plugins do not work and cannot be found in the respective folders. I also noticed, all the plugins were then sorted into a “Waves” folder in my applications, where as prior to this they were in the respective VST folders in my Audio > Plug Ins folders.

Is there an explanation for why this happened? Because, while I understand updating for so many plugins is costly and time consuming, this didn’t occur until I updated Waves Central… which tells me the update undid the compatibility.

7

Hey @jordansommer,

Welcome to the Waves Forum.

I see you are already in touch with our support team.
In order to have your licenses run on the latest OS Sequoia. You will require to update them to the latest V15.

Not supported does not mean it will not work as you experienced, that being said using your licenses on an unsupported setup may cause various issues, since those license versions were never qualified to run on the OS you updated to the assistance and or diagnose of the issue may be very limited.