Altium Design Trade-In 45% Off - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 17, 2019, 02:33:19 am
content: https://www.altium.com/trade-in$8000withthe trade-in?Trade-in KiCad

author: ahbushnell
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 17, 2019, 02:32:26 pm
content: Can you trade in Circuit Studio?

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 17, 2019, 08:05:35 pm
content: At this point "free" is the most appropriate price for the subscription anyway, even if the base price of the software weren't eight fucking thousand dollars.

author: Lromine
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 17, 2019, 10:58:21 pm
content: Hi all, I'm the VP of Marketing here at Altium and the short answer to your questions here is, Yes. We've enjoyed significant growth over these past years and we are keen to make it as easy as possible for everyone to join the family. This growth has created a lot of opportunities for sole proprietor Service Bureaus (Large Service Bureaus for that matter too), and we want to make sure that everyone has the ability to be a part of this growing family. Likewise, as we've added so many users, companies are finding a lot of design and engineering talent out there coming on board with Altium Designer experience and we want it to be easy for these companies to make the switch too. So, bring us what you got and we can most certainly work something out with you. These opportunities are worldwide, for the most part, so, ring us or just complete one of our forms around the internet or on our home page atwww.altium.com. We have something for everybody; existing customers looking to add a user, those looking to upgrade an older version of Altium Designer to the latest, trade in a competitive product, etc.On the Trade-In offer specifically, you will be locked in for 2 years which means you'll also be in the queue to get access to AD20 and AD21 while also having access to technical support the whole time.

author: mstevens
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 12:37:56 am
content: Quote from: Lromine on April 17, 2019, 10:58:21 pm"Marketing"... I know there were years where I paid for maintenance and got nothing. Then later Altium had a promotion where if your license was not current you could bring it up to date for less than $1k; so even though I had been paying every year those who opted not to were able to just get all those years of updates for essentially nothing. AD20 and AD21 may be a bit dubious.Then there is the I have been off maintenance and now I must make up all the back maintenance scheme.I own an AD license and have since Protel 99. I am glad to see Altium prospering. It would be nice if there were some consistency in the pricing and perhaps some lowering of it as well.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 01:19:41 am
content: Judging by the cluster going on in your Bugcrunch, not nearly as many customers are going to be attracted to new or continued subscriptions as you had hoped...Tim

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 02:16:29 am
content: Quote from: Lromine on April 17, 2019, 10:58:21 pmHi Lawrence, thanks for popping in! I have a marketing suggestion for you: If you're keen to get people on board with the subscription, you should probably do a better job of demonstrating its value. The shiny new features are great, but lots of veteran users have longstanding issues that are daily or even hourly pain points with Altium. Just look at Bugcrunch. Actually, does anyone at Altium look at Bugcrunch? Serious question, because of the 2700+ active bug reports (many active since 2011!) almost zero have any visible interaction from Altium staff. If you could get some actual responses from the development/testing team to some of these issues that would really help with user confidence.#7632is probably a good place to start:(note that this was submitted 2.5 years ago, and still zero response!)I'm sure you have or can obtain some numbers on subscription retention, but as far as I'm concerned the subscription does not present a net positive value anywhere close to its asking price, which I guess is part of why you're keen to give it away. It's also probably why our rep agreed to such a steep discount when we renewed this past year. If it weren't for that and the hope that AD19 would be worthwhile, I wouldn't have renewed at all. I'm definitely not renewing this year. When AD20 or AD21 comes out I'll be happy to demo it and if it seems worthwhile, great, I'll be happy to pay for it. But I'm not gonna pay for promises.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 03:14:07 am
content: Quote from: blueskull on April 18, 2019, 01:23:52 amThis is easily got around. You need to use a VPN, setting the end server to the USA when using Altium. Do this to access the Altium component vault.When not interacting with Altium's servers, simply set up your PC firewall to block altium.exe from accessing the net.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 03:17:14 am
content: Quote from: ajb on April 18, 2019, 02:16:29 amWelcome to the World of Altium.I did not update my licence of Altium 6.9 due to bugs carried over from earlier versions that Altium claimed had been rectified.And I note in Altium ver 14 which I use for work, that some of these bugs are still present.

author: Lromine
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 03:19:55 am
content: I sent you a Direct Message and I talked to the GM in China. Just reach out to us via those contact details and we will move it over once we give it a look in the database...

author: Lromine
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 03:43:49 am
content: These are fair points. I've been here at Altium for ~14 years, started as a sales guy and have direct experience with customers on this very topic. It's a balancing act to be sure. When we say we want to make it easy for people to access the product, this must include those that have lapsed their subscription, for whatever reason. Often it's simply due to workload and they simply let it go dormant, and yes, sometimes it's because they've decided that we weren't for them. Fortunately, it's typically the former. No matter the reason, from time to time we do lower that financial barrier so as that these users can come back into the fold. We do it rarely, and it's typically a very positive thing. Once on subscription (or back on as it were), we assume the onus to deliver value greater than the dollars you've invested. Again, fortunately, the vast majority of our subscribers do renew with us. As and for the consistency of releases, many years ago we had an admittedly lackluster record. However, this has not been the case for many years now, and we consistently release robust new versions on time year after year. We strive to strike a balance between revolutionary new features, requested must-have feature requests, and yes, bug fixes. These release notes can be found herehttps://www.altium.com/documentation/19.1/display/ADES/Altium+Designer+19.1+-+((New+Features+and+Updates+Summary))_ADYou can toggle between the various releases going back to AD15 and anything earlier than that, you can find under "Historical Release Notes". Again, it's a balancing act, but we really do make an effort to enable everyone that has a desire to use our products.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 04:45:05 am
content: Quote from: DerekG on April 18, 2019, 03:14:07 amWhy blueskull should be doing this dance after paying 12k.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 04:52:36 am
content: My problem with Altium Designer was it was never been a finished product. Each version had infuriating bugs. I was under impression Altium did not give shit about making efforts to make releases polished.

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2019, 05:21:08 am
content: Quote from: Lromine on April 18, 2019, 03:43:49 amI decided not to renew my subscription because I have lost trust in Altium.When we were a small startup, we purchased two seats and subscription.. It was version 13 time. We had endless trouble with bugs. ALtium blamed our hardware, so we went out and bought new PC's that were exactly to spec. Yet the bugs remained. I remember nearly have a crash every few hours, and it just made it impossible. Given that we had spent so much of our money, we had no option to continue.. After numerous attempts at getting things resovled and after some 12 months we were at the end of our 'subscription' and thing had not improved. I had some bad experiences with Altiums support people and had they been my people, they would have been called in for a serious talk. Your sales engineer kept pestering me and eventually Altium did the right thing and gave us a new subscription for free, in recognition of the problems we had ( although never admitted that there was a problem ).We upgraded and got to version 17, and it does 99% of what I must have. It does not do all i'd Like to do, but i can work around that. I evaluated version 18, and i was just terribly disapointed, that it was once again full of bugs, and i was not going to move to that from what was finally a mostly stable bit of software. When i look at bug crunch right now, I see that there is still many thousands of unresolved issues. So when it was time for sub renewal, i was back where i was intially.. asking what actually was the sub paying for? Being able to upgrade to buggy software, when i had something that mostly worked for us. I have not looked at v19, I'm told its better by some my industry peers, but none are giving me 'rave' reviews, and several i know have also just stayed at v17 and are getting on with it.The issue i have is that i'm asked to pay quite substainial fees for 'subscription' but in the main, I dont' see how i can trust Altium to provide the service it said it was going to do, which was to fix problems.i'd need some pretty compelling reason, and a lot of reassurance to renew a subscription and there is no way that i think that i shoudl have to pay for the time that V18 was an option, given its large number of bugs.QuoteV13,14,15 were buggy, 13 was nearly unusable.16 and 17 were acceptable.18 was ( to all accounts, but not my experinence ) not really usable.19 Is not getting rave reviews, but has supposabley fixed some things.You are right, its been very lackluster, and you burned my trust ( and others )QuoteVersion 18 was not that long ago?QuoteHad Altium just fixed the bugs, you woudl still have me as a subscriber, but one who probably had a neutral view on it. Adding some new features would give you the opportunity to convert me into a raving customer who loves you.. But because ( in my expereince ) bugs never got fixed and i suffered lots of crashes, well, I dont' think that you do fix bugs, and you have lost my trust.I'm really glad that you have decided to post on the forum though. That is a good thing.Doing a proper evaluation of something like AD is not something that you can do in a few hours. You really have to do quite a bit of work in it, and thats time i cna't get back. I'd like to be able to submit a PO for a subscription, but i need to be able to justify it to my team, and right now, I can't.

author: thm_w
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2019, 12:42:25 am
content: v19 is quite good, only crashed on me once in ~30hrs of use (app kept open, never restarted).If you want a trial, it looks like its easy enough to get a 15 day license:https://www.altium.com/altium-trial-flow

author: radar_macgyver
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2019, 01:21:29 am
content: In my case, it doesn't have to crash - there are two bugs that force me to close and re-open it several times an hour:1. The properties tab often stops showing properties for the thing that's been clicked, and instead just shows the properties of the schematic sheet2. 'Refresh' in svndblibs does not do an svn pull from the server, just refreshes the database.Also memory usage. I'm glad it's 64-bit, but this reminds me of the bad old days of Firefox where memory usage would grow without bound. I often find X2.EXE using > 6 GB of memory and slowing to a crawl. Clearly a memory leak. Even just letting it sit idle with a design open, watch task manager and the memory usage slowly creeping up.I too have posted on bugcrunch numerous times, only one so far has ever got any response besides 'we're deactivating this because there was no activity'. Ugh.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2019, 01:11:32 pm
content: It's not a memory leak. I've seen it get up to 19GB with 4-5 boards and 40-50 schematics open.Davide

author: djsb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2019, 08:30:28 pm
content: I got the "Trade up" email. I thought about it for maybe five minutes. I paid £5k for Altium many years ago (I have a perpetual release 10 licence). I just can't afford to upgrade. Simple as that.I now use Kicad and ONLY Kicad. Why pay lots of money for software that is so buggy and for features that I will never use? This statement "We strive to strike a balance between revolutionary new features, requested must-have feature requests, and yes, bug fixes." seems to me to have the wrong priorities. In my opinion the bugs should be a priority and then the must have features and then the "revolutionary" new features last.I have access to both the Kicad developers list AND the Altium forum. Non of the messages I receive in my inbox from the Altium user forum are about bugs that HAVE been fixed (in fact these bug fixes are invisible to users as far as I can see). There are MANY messages from users complaining about bugs in new releases.Contrast that with Kicad where every evening I get messages about ALL THE BUGS THAT HAVE BEEN FIXED, feature requests and full transparency on how the software is being developed. Why would I want to go back to software that is going backwards. Anyway it seems to me Altium is in trouble. Why the discounts all of a sudden? Sorry I'm sticking with Kicad.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2019, 05:58:41 am
content: Quote from: djsb on April 19, 2019, 08:30:28 pmI moved over to DipTrace 4 years ago. I too was sick of the Atlium bugs. I've never looked back.QuoteI fully agree. Altium make such an advertising hoo-haa about their new features that users decide to take an upgrade or a new licence ......... to find out that half of the new "features" only half work.QuoteWelcome to the world of Altium.QuoteI joined in an Altium Webinar several years back to see the latest features on offer. The poor instructor had received an update overnight from the Chinese development centre only to find out the new update broke the very feature he was trying to show everyone. It was very embarrassing for him.QuoteYou could well be right. Altium are a publicly listed company with many shareholders to feed. They have to keep up all the hype to keep bringing on new users just to survive.

author: Gibson486
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2019, 03:57:24 am
content: Lol... I was surfing the web and an ad popped up. It was for Atium. It said the price was 3499 or something like that. I was kind of stunned and clicked it. It came with 2 upgrades. I was kind of confused and thought they were advertising the subscription, so I clicked around and I accidentally navigated out. I tried going back, but Google ad sense gave me a different ad instead. If that price was for real, I would buy it.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2019, 04:57:34 am
content: Quote from: Gibson486 on April 22, 2019, 03:57:24 amLook in the history of your web browser to find that Altium special offer.

author: jc101
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2019, 08:37:38 am
content: Quote from: Gibson486 on April 22, 2019, 03:57:24 amWas it for the Altium Startup Program?https://www.altium.com/altium-startup-program/Basically you pay and get Altium Designer and support for 3 years, for around that price. Then at the end of the time the licence times out, but if you purchase the full licence the price of the startup licence is deducted from the final bill. I went for this package as CS was causing me grief and I have already moved over from Eagle to CS and didn't want the pain of going back.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2019, 03:06:31 pm
content: Quote from: mstevens on April 18, 2019, 12:37:56 amAltium have a history of rollercoaster pricing.I was in the room when Nick Martin told all staff that they there slashing the price by 75% and were "burning the bridges" and could never go back to high priced software

author: Robert Karl
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2019, 08:49:31 am
content: Quote from: Gibson486 on April 22, 2019, 03:57:24 amSame here!But I found that link was for upgrading an existing Altium licence to the latest.https://www.altium.com/upgrade-oldorhttps://www.altium.com/de/upgradeI think this is prob what you also saw.Honestly I'm pretty disappointed. I'd not hesitate to buy it at that price.

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2019, 09:38:27 am
content: So, how do i know that versions 20, 21 will be resonably stable and bug free. I'm being asked to pay for something that i can't test, and in fact no body has tested. Based on previous expereince I simply dont' have confidence in Altium to deliver.

author: ddavidebor
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2019, 04:36:10 pm
content: It will never be bug free. It's Altium we're talking about.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2019, 10:40:08 pm
content: I just received an email from Altium offering the deals shown below. It can also be accessed from this webpage:https://go.altium.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?I clicked on the link provided in the email. The Altium server then automatically checks my existing Altium license & provides this statement:"*Offer expires May 22, 2019. Local currencies apply"."Team Up and Save""Get 40% off when you add a new seat of Altium Designer®!""Trade In - Trade Up""Get 45% off Altium Designer® 19 and 2 FREE years of subscription when you trade in your design tools from Eagle™, OrCAD™, PADS™, and more!""Level Up Your PCB Design Game""Upgrade an older version of Altium Designer® to Altium Designer 19 for ONLY $3,790 and get 2 FREE years of subscription!"So, for customers in Australia, the upgrade price is AUD$3,790I would actually be tempted ................ except I like & mainly use DipTrace these days. Not nearly as powerful as Altium but it is very logical & easy to use & I could (without difficulty) design and layout a computer motherboard if required.

author: olkipukki
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2019, 01:08:05 pm
content: Just saw it on youtube... they include 60 day free ondemand training

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2019, 06:52:22 pm
content: Quote from: Lromine on April 17, 2019, 10:58:21 pmThis was tyoical altitum. came in made lots of comments, and then just dissapears when a bunch of people who dont' drink the altiumade ask some hard questions. I thought he might have come back and answered the critism

author: Lromine
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2019, 08:12:36 pm
content: MrPackethead et al,I'm still here... I didn't realize that your last post was a direct question to me, sorry. Stay tuned as I will be posting here the 19.1 updates ~ next week to this thread for all of you. With 19.1 we will be very detailed about what specific bugs have been crunched, how many votes it got and what specific stability and performance enhancements were added and exactly what those enhancements mean in tangible terms. So, to answer your question about how you know that 20 and 21 will be great releases, in short, you don't. Perception is the reality and it is on Altium to change your perception. Let's face it, all software has bugs, but we need to do a much better job of communicating with our user base about exactly what we are doing to address said bugs, perceived or otherwise. Happy to engage! Thanks and stay tuned.

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2019, 10:40:16 pm
content: FWIW, I don't think anyone expects Altium to be perfect. Yes, all software has bugs, and more complex software tends to have more bugs--anyone who's ever used any sort of intricate specialty software is used to that. I think what really gets people so frustrated with Altium is that there are so many bugs that are 1) in really fundamental functions, like all of the stupid things that interactive routing does, or the way that grid snapping is completely and totally broken in Draftsman, and 2) that have been around FOREVER with zero indication from Altium that they're ever going to be addressed.

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 12:10:27 am
content: Quote from: Lromine on May 02, 2019, 08:12:36 pmExactly im glad you understand. And history is a very good predictor of what will happen in the future.QuoteUnstable and crashing software was my reality for 18 months, and the reality i got from 'support' (which was paid for ) wasthat it was 'my fault' and it was 'your hardware' and it was 'your os' and it was never altiums fault. When version 17 came along it was stable and oddly enough ran nicely on that same hardware that was at fault previously. When you say its my perception, It reinforces how i feel about altium. Altium really only thinks that its the end users problem.V17 is usable, but i'm glad i did'tn pay for support for version 18, because from all accounts from other users, v18 was not good.QuoteALtiums had more than were accpetable. All i wanted was somethign that did'tn crash!The reality is now, that i'm not prepared to 'trust' altium for updates to software that may or may not be 'resonable'. I've been burned. I coudl evalutate v19, and if it was good, i'd pay for V19, but i would not be prepared for something i can't test.

author: Lromine
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 02:24:21 am
content: MrPacketHead,By all means, let us post the release and then have a go with it. The eval is a download away from the top navigation on our pages. If you have any issues getting your hands on the eval, contact me directly, and I'll make sure you get what you need.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 02:42:15 am
content: Quote from: DerekG on April 25, 2019, 10:40:08 pmThat's not bad.Too bad your program stops working in two years time.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 02:45:27 am
content: Quote from: ajb on May 02, 2019, 10:40:16 pmOne of the problems might be that almost all of the original main coders are now gone. The core team had been there alongtime, many since the Protel days, and they wereverygood. The move to China sparked the eventual exodus. But Altium has always famously had long standing bugs that haven't been fixed.

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 03:04:01 am
content: Quote from: Lromine on May 03, 2019, 02:24:21 amI'm sure i can download and eval it. But A proper eval takes a resonable amount of time. Lets assume for the sake of argument that version 19 checks out just fine, and i was happy with it. That is not the issue. The issue is that you are asking me to buy and pay for maintenance for the untested ( and actually unwritten versions ) of code. Altiums track record is such that i dont' trust it to deliver code that is actually bug-free and stable enough to use.Given this, i'm not going to spend the time to evaluate vs19, because right now Altium has disqualified itself from my procurement, due to its track record of non delivery.If you had the option that i could choose to upgrade to the existing vs19, without maintenance, then I would evaluate it.I'm not so closed minded that i've said, never altium ever again. Things change and you guys might from here do a stellar job. But how am i supposed to evalate that. Right now altium has to be on a version by version basis only.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 03:29:02 am
content: What's happened is the big CAD companies priority is constantly adding features in an attempt to charge more money. Each feature is poorly done, not so useful and just clutters the user-interface and adds bugs.After 10-20+ years of that, you have a dog's breakfast CAD program that is hard to use, doesn't really do what the PCB designer needs and spews out exception errors a little too frequently. Then they have the audacity to charge for a maintenance subscription which is another nightmare. Ever update Altium in the middle of a big project? = trainwreck.Until the monopoly is dethroned, we all have to put up with low quality PCB CAD software, and bosses who expect PCB layout to be done quickly, efficiently and without errors.I look forward to drawing every PCB footprint from scratch, thanks Altium for bungling and orphaning your component libraries.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 04:43:33 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on May 03, 2019, 03:29:02 amWhen working at Altium we had to run and use the latest daily build. Fine for software people, bad idea for a hardware team trying to get actual jobs done. The hardware team quickly realised we had to use a "stable" version to get our daily work done, so we secretly agreed upon what we thought was a stable internal release and used that for serious work.I'll have to say though, not once in using all these internal builds (often very experimental) do I ever recall getting a corrupted file or losing work, which I found quite remarkable, as my fear was that some internal build would corrupt my file or something like that.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 04:48:42 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on May 03, 2019, 03:29:02 amThis was a big issue for Altium (and I'm sure other EDA companies), Protel 99SE was used by customers (especially in China) for about a decade and it was very difficult to get people to upgrade because the package did what they needed and it was stable. Adding new features didn't seem worthwhile to anyone, and it was always a hard sell getting people to upgrade their working tool. And it didn't help that they read on forum and hear from other that the latest versions were unstable etc.This is one of the reasons they moved away from supporting older version with bug fixes and pushed people onto subscription now, (apart from consistent income) it forces them to upgrade to get bug fixes.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 03, 2019, 09:56:45 pm
content: It's too bad they appear to have wasted money developing then orphaning CircuitMaker web-based app.Nobody wants their design to be entirely at the whim of Altium's servers up-time, security, policies and dynamic pricing based on the mood of the CEO.Cloud-based computing is being pushed on us all, but when you've got $10,000's of time and IP invested in component libraries and designs, moving to "I don't own my data and I cannot protect it" is ridiculous.Charging for private projects? Cloud only? I wonder why it's not catching on...If only this software development energy went into cleaning up some bugs, listening to feature fixes/wants from users, making libraries that can be trusted, and stopping the version 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 etc. race to nothing of significant value.

author: ajb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 06, 2019, 07:53:34 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on May 03, 2019, 04:48:42 amSo what you're saying is that the slow pace of bug fixes is a deliberate ploy to keep people on subscription(I say that as a joke, but that's exactly the sort of short-term thing that's incentivized by a subscription model. The problem is that, in the long term, it pisses off your customers)I don't have a problem with the subscription model per se--we have multiple subscriptions for Autodesk products, and we're perfectly happy with those because 1) The price is reasonable (and it's a naked subscription--there's no perpetual license to shell out for up front) and 2) there is noticeable quality of life improvement with every release. Sometimes it's new features, sometimes its bugfixes. Fusion 360 in particular, which is a relatively young product, is seeing rapid development, and most importantly, that development is rapid andhighly and visibly responsiveto user input.(Typing this while AD19 restarts, because after interactive routing started doing stupid stuff for the umpteenth time panning the PCB now causes an access violation. . . )

author: cadguy68
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 17, 2019, 02:34:01 pm
content: Quote from: Bud on April 18, 2019, 04:52:36 am^^This^^100%^^