Price Advice

[topos]

First off, this is a friendly question and I love vray (for sketchup, unparalleled in my opinion), I just want to understand the logic behind pricing... I understand this is a business but from my recent experience and a some informal surveys, they are countless firms and freelancers using sketchup who are dying for vray-quality type of renderers and are turning to the so-called "unbiased" packages or other cheap solutions solely because of pricing. I don't have to tell you that the sketchup crowd doesn't pay much for their software (and that's the point) so when the rendering plugin costs twice as much as the main tool needless to say that people are completely turned off. The worst part is that when you show vray renderings to people, they are absolutely in love with it, then you show them the price and they won't even consider it. You guys could make a killing by slashing prices and flood the market with vray (for the better and the long term). Don't tell me that it's development because once you sell ten times more than you do now even with the price difference AND establishing a vray long term consumer following, the return on investment will be there for sure. Even bigger firms I know who have a lot of money would gladly invest if floating licencing existed but at $800 a seat you're more expensive than anybody out there on any platform! Believe it or not but this post comes out of shear passion and admiration for vray and what it can do, I just want to understand why you guys make the business decisions you make (and there's obviously a reason) and end up hurting the very (great) product your trying to sell?.. Thanks again, sorry for the monologue..

[andybot_cg]

Re: Price Advice

Heck, why increase the competition!? I think it's fair to say most of us are making money using vray, and if it were too cheap, everyone could do it. (I'm kinda saying this mostly tongue in cheek)

[-Keith]

Re: Price Advice

Hello Topos,

This is a friendly answer too. There are tons of reasons the price is the way it is and going into each and every one involves more typing then... well frankly I want to do right now. Nothing ever happens for just one reason, there's so very much to consider when trying to determine something like pricing but lets look at three reasons. Remember there's tons more.

1. V-Ray for SketchUp is actually quite cheap when judged against its most serious competitors:
There really aren't many renderers for SketchUp at all, yet alone ones that match the quality and speed of V-Ray. The best match* according to most is Maxwell priced at $995 a seat compared to V-Ray's $799 a seat. Also any seat of V-Ray can be used as a floating license, I'm not sure why you say "would gladly invest if floating licencing existed". As another factor to take in to account V-Ray for 3DSM is about $1385.00 right now.

2. V-Ray is a premium product:
I'm not the only one who thinks V-Ray is the best, ask around. We have worked hard to make sure it is worth the money it costs. The way we put it all together the money spent on V-Ray is a long term investment. Forgetting that using V-Ray to secure one good contract or a handful of small ones will easily make back the cost of the software, or that having V-Ray in your toolkit will help you secure more clients from the start. Here's the real clincher, a license of V-Ray does not expire and we do not charge for support. So far we have never charged for an update and should we ever do such a thing** we would a) make it worth it b) make it optional.

3. Its a niche market:
The cold hard truth is that there are only so many seats of V-Ray to sell out there at any given time. It's not the kind of program that everyone needs and as stated before we don't charge for updates. If we had some sort of epic firesale there would in all likely-hood come a point where there was not too many people that have a use for V-Ray that did not have it already. In the end we would probably not make enough money to survive.

In the end I can say that the reasoning goes way beyond just that but it basically adds up to "sorry the price is gonna stay the way it is". I'm glad you care enough to want to see us do better and it's not at all that your idea is not coming from the right place. We have a similar idea that we have spent some time on and I think that personally its an awesome compromise. Right now its still in the "secret planning" stage so I my hands are tied, I can say no more.

Stars:
* Comparable is in the eye of the beholder. V-Ray is way better then everyone else as far as my feelings are concerned.
** We do not plan to charge for any updates.

Sources:
All the other rendering engines for SketchUp(really its all the plugins.) :
http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/d...d/plugins.html

[DiditzZz]

Keith made a good point there. Topos, you are looking only to a consumer's point of view. There are still others, such as business PoV, investor PoV, education PoV, etc.

I myself find that VRay being a mid-end expensive render engine is already good as it is. There are quite a few render engines out there that costs below $200, claiming they're User-friendly, easy to use, no hassle, etc. But what people are looking is the quality. Honestly if you ask me, I'd say the more expensive a product is, the better the quality of outcome results will be. Yeah sure some will say that you are not using the cheap products efficiently but again we are looking at the niche as a whole. All renderers will take time to learn and master, and still keep learning.

My $0.02

[kwistenbiebel1]

Vray is a top quality render engine.
It works pretty well for other platforms.

However, the Sketchup version feels it needs further development...and as I understand that is what is going to happen.

[ValeroStudio]

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. That's all I have to say.