I just received an email that my V-Ray premium and Rendernodes are going to become more expensive again. BUT I get VERAS AI, etc which…I don’t want. I didn’t ask for it, because I don’t need it.
I have been stating this a lot of times already in the last years. The only reason I have Premium is because I need a floating license. I don’t use any of the other things you want to cram in there to justify a pricehike. I don’t want it, I don’t need it.
So when will you give the clients an option to just go SOLO with floating, because if you won’t, I’m out. Really. There’s absolutely no justification for a price increase again that reflects on the services I need and I’m getting tired of it.
Also there’s really barely any noteworthy updates in the last years, it’s ridiculous even, one would think with the rise of AI the coding would be done faster, but ever since, it’s gotten slower.
This is the classic Chaos we’ve been dealing with since 2020. Like any good dealer, they get you hooked on Beta features. They let us, the users, test and refine their tools for free. Then, once a feature is deemed “good enough” (which is highly debatable; just look at the initial Vantage release), they slap a price tag on it and bury it in the most inconvenient bundle possible. All while stripping away other products they originally hooked us on, like Phoenix, using the exact same method.
Chaos used to be a company “for artists, by artists,” but that hasn’t been the reality for years. The C-suite is just jumping on the AI bandwagon because they see dollar signs. Instead of actually improving the core products and tools we use daily, they hand us the same old software and rely on AI, which was trained on our hard work to “level it up.”
Also the monthly reset credit system for AI enhancements? Have a busy month? You’ll burn through half your credits just generating 20 variations to properly age a single wall, forcing you to buy more when you could have just used a dirtmap. But if you had a slow month prior and didn’t touch the tool? Too bad, those unused credits just vanish because they don’t roll over. It’s entirely designed against the unpredictable workflow of actual artists. Are we really surprised at this point?
Why not make a indie style license for freelancers like Autodesk did? It’s hard enough to earn new work and compete with AI generated images as it is. Let us pick and choose the features we need instead of bundling in products you don’t fully believe in to increase the cost. Let users vote with their subs to see if we really need those tools.
Yeah, a plugin costing more than the software was abnormal, now it is becoming the norm. I realized last month that I was paying $57 a month for poliigon, which is almost $700 a year. If you cancel your subscription, you lose all access to all the textures you downloaded. It would be like opening a MAX scene and losing all of the assets you downloading using Cosmos. Having said that, the price increase is not welcomed, but it is ever?
As Asset Use & Licensing | Poliigon Help Center it seems that you can still use them…I don’t know about accessing to them but if you downloaded and you have saved in your library, well it seems that you can still use…
Most studios have workflows setup for AI which are much better and more advanced than this. We should not be forced to pay the late implementation of tech that isn’t at an international level. I understand Chaos needs to get with the future and AI, but this shouldn’t be at the expense of the everyday user.
The future will be screen capture rendering, 1 frame and a raw screen capture animated sequence playblast. So not sure how the future will look, but if you are paying premium then that change will be faster and forced upon more users. Tech is changing quickly and I get the need to implement and expand current offer to keep with the times, not an easy situation.
We understand the company direction, however pricing in upgrades which people should be able to choose and pay rather than forced and replicated upon pricing is not the way forward. It will make people drop the classics and leap one step ahead, not the other way round.
Totally agree. I am a solo user with a small farm doing CGI. I don’t want or need all of the clunky AI features. Don’t make us pay for it otherwise there will be a mass-exodus to emerging engines like D5 which I am more and more impressed by.
We are learning the true cost of compute tokens and as far as it looks from here, these practices are solely to skim a middle man fee.
If it wasn’t true, AI features wouldn’t be compulsory, we would be able to buy tokens a la cart, and run locally. But instead, this price hike reveals that they are using the hype to make money off of what’s most certainly a very basic and constrained stable diffusion wrapper… $200 per year, per user for rate limited usage - it’s a dumb, back of the napkin calculation. Its most likely set up to cover their costs but they(or their PE owner) are also certainly banking on people forgoing compute all together. The irony is that they would certainly prefer if no one used “enhance AI” at all. That’s where they will make most of their profit - non-AI users.
The blatant greed feels like a real sea change but I also feel bad for the chaos devs. It’s clearly MBA or PE people pumping for profit. It’s really pathetic and in 2026 its never been easier to switch engines - not nearly as difficult as switching molders.
I honestly just hope this is the beginning of the end. I’ve been doing this for over 16 years, and I’m just riding out the rest of whatever direction this industry is going in.
AI enhancers and image generators are now getting wrapped up in expensive credit and token systems. Those who have become reliant on them will slowly lose their advantage because they can no longer generate iteration after iteration until they get it right for mere pennies.
We see all the posts of guys trying to break into our industry, and I commend them for trying to start out today. AI is an easy path for someone new to get semi-convincing results for clients who are equally new. Those artists will have to start paying more and more for credits to get marketable results. Eventually, they will need to choose between learning to use the tools and building consistency, or increasing their costs to cover their credits, becoming less competitive.
At the end of the day, using AI is their choice to make! It shouldn’t be forced on everyone else by basically making every user subsidize data center credits through bundled subscriptions. I should be able to opt out of the bundled items I don’t use (like cloud rendering credits). I shouldn’t have to involuntarily contribute to millions of liters of water and the additional warming of the planet because someone needs to make 43 variations of something because they have not yet developed the skillset to achieve it.
Working for a large scale infrastructure consultancy, I have relied on Vray for 20+ years.
We are being pushed (By engineers who don’t understand the process) to completely abandon it and move to an Unreal Envrionment but I really don’t want to do that and have succesfully pushed back.
Every time Chaos put up the price without any features that are helping my workflow, they push me towards this (Inevitable) change.
Chaos need to lift the product in meaningful ways or reduce, not increase, the price.
I think Chaos should also consider the current AI landscape. AI is helping companies become more efficient and reduce costs, so from a customer’s perspective, prices should be becoming more competitive, not increasing. At a time when artists and studios are under pressure, price stability would be much more welcome than another increase
But that’s unfortunately not how compute heavy tasks/software works. The conceit of gen AI(diffusion models and llms) is that you offload most of(the reality), or all of(the marketing) “the work” onto compute which costs money - the more work the greater the cost. All you have to do is look at coders running claude code, before and after anthropic switched to token based billing. It is ultimately the opposite of the saas models which was; the more you use the software the cheaper it gets(cost hour used). What these “AI” companies or companies integrating “AI” are basically doing is turning everything into a cloud rendering service. This is why chaos is forced to charge more - the other engines are not implementing AI so no additional token costs for them to pass on. On top of that, there is good reason to believe that all of this gen AI stuff is subsidized so it will certainly only get more expensive.
If you want price stability, your only option is running open source models locally, same as rendering cg.
AI is nothing new, except it went mainstream. When WEB 3.0. and the Metaverse failed to materialize, they looked for other revenue streams, and AI was it. All of the people saying AI will replace the human, are the ones selling AI. Jump on board or be left behind isn’t anything new in sales. I think AI is here, will always be here, but it’ll be behind the scenes in most places.
Ed Zitron is one of the lead skeptics right now, and so much so that he was sent leaked financials from OpenAI - I believe this is the report you’re referring to. Apparently OpenAI may be hiding a decent portion of their their massive inference costs within their marketing budget. It doesn’t look good.
