After looking forward to Waves Stream finally come out to find out they want to charge monthly $9 fee. I won’t be using it. There are several other choices for free out there.
Seems all companies now of days want to lock you into monthly fees, constant revenue for them and constant cost for you.
After using Waves plugins for over 20years, it’s sad to see.
Well it does provide another incentive to help convince those considering subscribing to Creative Access to actually take the dive.
Exactly my point. Keep paying me forever.
With updates, new plugins, we’re still paying forever anyway. As we do with electricity gas, fuel for the car, mechanics servicing the car, other software… There’s no real difference one way or the other.
I disagree with this. You pay if you want to, but it’s almost now as you have too pay to keep using a product. A car is a whole different beast and like a car if you want to keep using our products you are going to have to keep paying us is not the model of a company I would want to support.
There was a time when you bought a plugin and owned it for life, like buying a pair of pliers. And back then the updates were free for life.
Waves and many others have adopted the view of prying deeper into the customers pockets and will keep doing it as long as people fall for this type of thing.
Perhaps you could point out the companies that have free updates for life so I can go support them. I’ve been buying plugins for my studio for 30 years and have never been offered free updates for life.
I don’t want this to be a rant of back forth. The start of this original post was about having to pay monthly for the new “Stream” plugin. The point I’m trying to make here is about not paying monthly for an item. Buying item and owning an item. This is how it was 30 years ago, and how it was not too long ago for most plugin/software companies. Now it is getting more and more normal to keep renting (paying) monthly for tools. And I do remember companies offered updates for free back in the day. Pro Tools (Digidesign Sound Designer, Logic Audio (which was Emagic), Cakewalk (Sonor), SoundForge, McDsp, Bomb Factory, Drawmer just to name a few.
Plugins aren’t like buying a pair of pliers, assuming these are make pliers once and they last forever. That means they don’t requite maintenance
The better analysis is cars as I suggested, because they DO require maintenance so you can keep using them, just as plugins.
You can’t make plugin once and expect it to work forever like a pair of pliers because the exist in the ever changing space of computers, DAWs, interfaces and audio standards. If you want your plugins to keep running they have to be maintained.
Just because some bought a plugin once for $30 doesn’t entitle them to unlimited for ever and ever plugin updates. These things cost money to produce, bills need to be paid, employees need to eat. They need to pay for it somehow, but that $30 isn’t going to be able to cut it, especially for ever and ever.
Once again it seems I’m not clear on my point. My point is monthly payments to use a plugin is a never ending solution. Not a good solution on my opinion.
Oh no that bit is clear.
However, if you look in the case of Steam, you’re also paying for the infrastructure. It doesn’t just transmit audio by magic, servers are involved. They need maintaining, security is always a big thing and as more people use it there will be the cost of expansion.
You can’t run any of that on a small upfront fee indefinitely.
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