Re: Anyone have real world prices for PADS and Altium Designer PCB design apps?

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:36:39 -0800, "Joel Kolstad"
<JKolstad71HatesSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<anon@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:vm1fr2pfrcbtnf6u3usi9g565gfr36jmna@xxxxxxxxxx
I was curious about how pricing works in the PCB CAD industry, if
everyone pays list or if discounting off list is common practice.

Generally speaking, the more expensive the product is, the more likelihood
there is that you'll be able to negotitate a discount/better package
price/etc. Speaking very roughly, anything <$1k is probably pretty fixed in
price, anything >$10k has somewhat flexible pricing. Additionally, the more
licenses you have, the more likely you are to be able to negotiate a deal.

We're likely to spend more than $10K, so if a discount is possible in
that price range, that's good to know. As an example, if you're buying
a car in that price range, you probably wouldn't expect much of a
discount. But if $10K is roughly the threshold at which CAD tools
begin to be discounted, that's something I didn't know.

It's
beginning to sound like high end CAD systems have both high initial
purchase prices and high annual maintenance fees.

Annual maintenance fees are typically 10-20% of the purchsae price. Companies
differ in how much support they'll provide to those out of maintenance...
Mentor won't let you do much of *anything* (no access to their knowledge base,
no access to service packs, etc.). This "no downloads of anything, even if
it's just a patch to fix a BUG in the software we ALREADY sold you" approach
unfortunately seems to be getting more common -- Pulsonix just adopted it with
their newest release, 4.5.

One acquintance we works at an end user company told me that their
ASIC design package didn't have a purchase price or annual maintenance
fee, just an annual license fee of $140K per year per seat. That price
also came with an NDA so he couldn't tell me which package he was
referring to. Aside from jolting me awake, we weren't looking to make
our own ASICs, so that information was only peripherally interesting
to me.

.

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