To all Vantage users: a new INDIE subscription???

[davide_paolini]

Good morning everyone,

I invite all Vantage users to share their opinion in this topic regarding a proposal for Chaos: creating an annual subscription for Indie, targeting those who invoice under $100k or €, similar to Autodesk 3DS Max Indie (https://makeanything.autodesk.com/3dsmax-indie). Please note that 3DS Max Indie has an annual subscription price of €290+VAT compared to the regular price of €1855+VAT.

I believe it is fair to offer the possibility of a "CHAOS INDIE COLLECTION" (V-Ray + Vantage + Phoenix, essentially the same as the current CHAOS EDU COLLECTION) at a more reasonable price of around $600 instead of the current sum of $1100, which is the combined cost of V-Ray and Vantage.

As an instructor of V-Ray and Vantage courses, I have had over 2500 students in Italy and I am very familiar with the Italian designer market. A price of $1200 is very high for an average designer in Italy to allocate for rendering software, especially since many of them are freelancers. I don't believe the market for European designers is significantly different from Italy, as I have several contacts in the industry.

Personally, I consider Vantage to be a magnificent software, but this high pricing decision for the market I know would likely lead to failure. Therefore, I kindly ask Chaos to seriously consider the option of adding a more reasonable INDIE subscription price.

I invite all Vantage users to provide their feedback in this topic.

Thank you.


arch. Davide Paolini

3DGraphicAcademy

[mindventures]

1000 percent indie license supporter here!!!
This is exactly what I have suggested a few times before. But unfortunately I don't think they will listen or even think about this... As far as the price structure of their products is concerned, Chaos has become significantly less customer-friendly over the years and they have a really strange pricing strategy. For example, I have a vray premium subscription with 10 render nodes and have to pay around 2.000 euros per year, which I think is way too much, especially for the render nodes, which are nearly 3 times the price of vray premium subscription. And now vantage is not even part of the premium subscription anymore and costs more than vray sub. They always manage to give you the feeling that you have to pay more and more, but get less and less in return.

[iouzounis]

Agreed, indie licensing is a must for all freelancers and small studios that don't have a high enough revenue. Prices seem too steep to follow nowdays.

[BeaZtiE]

Hello all,
my company (3DWS) is a partner with chaos for nearly 20 years.
I also agree with this suggestion, we have a minimum of over 100 similar inquiries like this per year.
I agree that the Vantage product is super innovative and could be a total game changer. But I think that Chaos can make "freelancer creative bundle" (or some like that) - example V-ray + Corona + Vantage made for freelancers (for the type of professionals, but the type that cannot deduct VAT and private users) is good to have some lower price - example price V-ray solo (or something lower - for example, 500 euros with VAT included or less..) and with a ceiling of 50-60-100k Dollars/Euros per year... One license per person/studio. This, in my opinion, will ease the difficult path of freelancers new to the business.
I hope Chaos will think about this.
personally I raised this issue many times, but so far there has been no development on this request...

[squintnic]

Chaos pricing has got much higher and support has really dropped over the years. The only exception to this is the PHX facebook group that is very good.

I fit into the indie studio price bracket and would like to be able to use this.
Vantage pricing is not great given we already pay for a lot of other licenses (vray, phx, render nodes etc)

[glorybound]

I don't think it'll happen. This is why they purhcased Corona. It is like going into a BMW dealer wanting KIA proces. If you can't affor V-Ray, there is Corona. If they didn't buy Corona, they would have lost a lot of users to it.

[Jiri.Matys]

You are wrong. Corona people come to Chaos if they dont want to buy them.

[Pixelcon]

I don't think it'll happen. This is why they purhcased Corona. It is like going into a BMW dealer wanting KIA proces. If you can't affor V-Ray, there is Corona. If they didn't buy Corona, they would have lost a lot of users to it.

it's only 22% cheaper than Vray. Hardly a valid comparison.

[glorybound]

You are wrong. Corona people come to Chaos if they dont want to buy them.

I don't understand?

[glorybound]

it's only 22% cheaper than Vray. Hardly a valid comparison.

Maybe the 22% will widen and you can do month to month with Corona. There has to be a reason that Chaos purchased Corona.

[squintnic]

chaos have their investors to please and will continue to wring as much money out of existing customers as possible cos they know they have them on the hook, this is known as a 'loyalty tax' in banking and is applied to long term users/customers while they pursue fresh blood and is generally what incentivizes people to change even if the product works the feeling of being consistently priced out has a powerful effect.

disappointing but i suppose inevitable. vantage is what vray GPU should have become IMO, especially given the extremely slow development of vray gpu over the last 5 years.

i get they need to improve revenue but leeching it from a small long term user base is not the way IMO. i dont hold high hopes tbh. the lack of a demo for Vantage 2 to me is kinda insane given i tested the first one, wanted to see what was new before buying but cos i used the old demo (testing only) im ineligible for a demo to see if I would but. its simply a poor approach to loyal customers.

[glorybound]

From what I watch from YouTubers, Vantage only makes sense if you are already in V-Ray. If you are not, then there are already a lot of options. People won’t come to V-Ray to get Vantage and they won’t come to Vantage (standalone), because again, they have better options. I am not sure what the game plan is for Vantage, other than trying to get current V-Ray users to pay double. Everyone I know who is trying to get started are using Blender and Unreal. The comparison I have seen, Unreal is a much better solution, albeit not as accurate as V-ray and Vantage, but free, and of course Blender is free. I am confused. If Vantage was included in a package with V-Ray, it might prevent V-Ray users from wondering away and attract new users to the V-Ray family. V-Ray to Unreal is pretty much = to V-Ray to Vantage. V-Ray to Vantage is a little more convenient, but V-Ray to Unreal is more powerful. IDK... just one mans opionion.

[trick]

I have been using Lumion, Twinmotion, Unreal and D5 just to get competitive and fast animations because clients were asking for it. The number of clients who want to pay top $$ for 2K/4K VRay rendered animations are far from what they used to be and that is very understandable. Looking at the price of Vantage in that regard, I don't think it is overly expensive if you see what you get in return. What is very surprising, is to see that there is NO offer for current VRay users, whether in the form of a package deal or a discount. Even more surprising is that there is no better integration with VRay INSIDE the host application. That way I would always choose over any of the competitors. Another relatively BIG thing is that there is no possibility to make a standalone to send an interactive model to clients, where the model quality can be adjusted to the power of the client's computer. Therefore I still need one of the competitors and then paying extra for Vantage is hard to justify!

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Chaos pricing has got much higher and support has really dropped over the years. The only exception to this is the PHX facebook group that is very good.

I would be very interesting to know a little bit more about the reasons why do you consider Chaos Support dropped over the years?
Chaos invest a lot of recourses to provide the best in-class Support and if we are missing something we'll definitely do our best to improve it.

Best Regards,
Svetlozar Draganov

[Pixelcon]

I would be very interesting to know a little bit more about the reasons why do you consider Chaos Support dropped over the years?
Chaos invest a lot of recourses to provide the best in-class Support and if we are missing something we'll definitely do our best to improve it.

Best Regards,
Svetlozar Draganov

I can chime in here and say that for me, support is lacking in even aknowledging quite a few of my requests. If a feature request or bux-fix or behavior change is not going to happen, I'd rather be told than just left in silence...
Chaos's shift in focus away from pretty much purely Arch-viz towards a broader vfx user-base has meant that the types of features I make noise about seem to be off the bottom of any sort of priority list and the lack of feeback on the forums sort of confirms that.

On the other hand parts of the support team are indeed doing a fantastic job. It goes both ways imo.