Creo Parametric Maintenance & Licensing

Matt, if you don't pay for maintenance your license file doesn't change.

You have no more tech support or upgrade and, if your SW return in maintenance, you have to pay for all the years you haven't paid.

Marco

Sorry for digging up an old post but there's not much info out there and my question seems relevant to this conversation.

We have 7 seats of Creo, including 1 Flex 3c, 1 Eng II, and 2 ISDX and AAX addons  so our maintenance was coming in pretty high this year. and the reality is, we're still on Creo 3, and we are using more and more SolidWorks, because this is what our clients are asking for.

So we thought it prudent to look at down scaling our support (after our reseller trying to push us to subscription) to just 4 heavy seats. We were then told that if we do this, we would have to relinquish our licences that are no longer on support.. have anyone ever heard of this? so we couldn't run our 3 Creo parametric licences that we no longer have support for even though we bought the software outright?

any info appreciated.. but I'm tempted to just drop support completely (we only use it for software upgrades and right now we are on creo 3, moved to creo 4 when ever a client wants us to which we currently have licences for and move any other workload we have to solidworks and deal with creo 5 if / when we need to..) 

really frustrated right now to be honest...

Tom

Keep in mind as well that PTC is working to actively move everyone over to the subscription model.  Sooner or later the perpetual maintenance renewal prices will become so high that it won't make sense to continue with them, even at the loss of the perpetual license "ownership".

While I agree with your statement, at the same time I can argue that the maintenance on perpetual licenses are already overly expensive, especially considering the consistent issues that are within every release. New functionality never completed within one release (sometimes taking multiple releases to complete), new "bugs" in the software releases that never get resolved (intended functionality), compatibility with PRO/E and Windchill, and so called major releases that get delayed not just months but in some cases years.... The cost to small businesses to maintenance licenses for what is just a TOOL to get the job done is hard to justify (cost to small businesses may look like peanuts to the larger companies, but it does have a big impact)

Now that subscriptions are being forced upon us (like shoved down our throats), I think in the long run subscriptions are going to be even more expensive to the small businesses. Being FORCED to pay a subscription maintenance just to use the software, regardless of the release, is going to be more costly because once the subscription expires the software can no longer be used. Even if I were to eliminate PRO/E all together here and move to something else, I still need to maintain the subscription for access to my Windchill maintained files.

In my opinion, just mine, I think PTC is going to start losing customers, especially the small businesses simply because of the subscriptions. For my company, I have already started looking at what other options are available, and the overall cost, because I would rather pay that upfront overly expensive price to own the software. However, I will say this, if the subscriptions were going in the direction we were led to believe when CREO was first introduced, I may have a different view on this, especially if I could do subscription on a "per module" basis" and keep my PRO/E base module on a perpetual license

(CREO was marketed something like ANY LICENSE, AT TIME....blah blah blah)