3DS Max Indie Licence cheaper that VRay Solo Licence

[curtisdesign]

I'm looking to upgrade my VRay 3 licence to VRay Solo. The cost is very prohibitive. I'm a freelancer so I have an 3DS Max Indie licence which costs around £300 / year. I have a laptop and a render PC so will need VRay solo workstation and one render node. With the current VRay solo pricing structure I will be paying more for VRay than I do for 3D Studio. Is there an Indie licence available for VRay?

[bartel]

Currently, there is no indie licence, and I'm not aware of one being announced, either.

Off-topic rant (I probably shouldn't post late at night. As you wrote "upgrade", I assumed you wanted to upgrade to another perpetual version, but it sounds like you are talking about renting):
The whole thing of punishing customers for skipping versions is greedy to begin with. If a new version truly offers great new features, then the customer not being able to use them should be punishment enough and they would be silly not to buy it. And if a version doesn't interest a customer, then don't make them pay for the uninteresting version retroactively when you finally manage to pique their interest with a new version. Granted, the price doesn't rise further if you skip more than one version, but with that one skip you are already paying more than a new perpetual used to cost, and that's adjusted for inflation.
There are also developers who allow upgrades from any version to the newest one at the same price.

[curtisdesign]

Thanks for the reply bartel

I've no idea what your 'rant' is about. I've just purchased Chaos V-Ray Solo for a year which has cost me 1.75 times what I pay for 3DS Max per year. Seems a large imbalance between the two when the render plugin costs nearly twice as much as the program which it adds on to.

[bartel]

My reasoning is along the following lines: Seeing as you're "upgrading" from version 3, you might still have a perpetual license for that version. Without punishments for skipping versions and recent price hikes, in an ideal world, so to speak, you would be able to upgrade that version + the render licence to an up to date perpetual licence for an affordable price (higher if seen for one year alone, but quickly becoming cheaper with every year you are using it).

But as it is, you'd have to pay more than former full price to upgrade to a new perpetual version, not valuing your initial investment, and the same holds true for render nodes (maybe because they want you to do cloud rendering).

But your issue at hand is different from that. There might be an idie version down the line if enough people have bought into renting the software and they want to get to those not able to rent at this price. That's a mere guess, but as Chaos has clearly taken a page out of the Autodesk book, things might continue to develop similarly.