Pricing

Discounts#

I don't do Black Friday nonsense. I don't do Santa Claus discounts. I don't do 99% off surprise clown sales.

What I normally do is one time-limited discount at launch, an early-bird code for the people who watch my videos while they're fresh or for the mailing list, and then it is gone. When it expires, people email me saying they missed it and could they have it anyway.

I said at the launch that the price would go up, and then it went up. That's what the early bird discount is for.

I find this kind of perplexing despite acknowledging that people like to pay less. It makes me think of the time I was supposed to engineer a recording session at Studio Wong. The artist paid an advance deposit to book the studio session. Then on the day, I was there ready to go, waiting, and the artist just didn't turn up.

Can I have my deposit back please?

Erm, no... isn't that the actual entire point of a deposit?

Prices go up as the product gets better#

I read my comment section and emails and actually consider good feature ideas.

The more I work on the plugins and add to them, the higher I will set the price to reflect that.

Class A launched at €9 as a kind of joke, and when version two added bunch of features, the price went up to €14. Then with version 3 it went to €19, and when Tractatus came out, everyone who had bought Class A got a free upgrade to it, and now Class-A costs €49. So my early supporters are rewarded for trusting me while I make the plugins even better. People who come later still get a great price relative to other products in the industry, but all of the wrinkles are already ironed out for them. It's fair all round.

So my advice has always been the same: if you are interested, even a bit, buy it now, because it is only going to get more expensive and better.

Upgrades are free for life#

Every one of my plugins comes with free upgrades for life, and that includes the cases where a plugin is rewritten so completely that it gets a new name. Curvature was rewritten from scratch as Convexity, and everyone who bought Curvature found a Convexity licence put into his account automatically. Class A has been retired the same way, and every owner gets its successor, Tractatus.

Isn't it unfair that someone who paid €9 gets a plugin that costs several times that? No. I've been saying the whole time: buy it now, because it's only going to get more expensive and better with the free upgrades. Everyone who believed in me early has been rewarded for it.

The deal is on the whole set#

The plugins that work together with Dogma, namely Convexity, Tractatus and Soloquium, launched with a complete-the-set deal instead of knocking a percentage off each one. If you own all four, bought together or one at a time in any order, you get €49 off, so one is essentially free. A Curvature or Class A licence counts towards the set. There is no code to type in; the website works it out.

Free software is a gift, not a right#

I give away a fair amount of free and open-source software. But nobody has a right to demand it. An independent developer has to balance generosity with paying the rent, and the people who get real value from his work, pirated or otherwise, should support it. The other side of that coin is in piracy.

Most of my plugins have no demo. Either buy it or don't buy it. If not having a demo is a deal breaker, then the deal is broken.

Value#

What I want is gear that is good, full stop, not "good for the price". Price only comes into it when something is genuinely prohibitive, like flagship PMC monitors when you can build your own for a fraction of the price.

I also look at price from the perspective of dollar per hour of use. A keyboard I type on every working day is dirt cheap per hour, even if it costs more than $500 (Kinesis Advantage360 Professional). A suit bought to wear to one wedding is the opposite.