There’s always the possibility that Autodesk could get really nasty and bump up maintenance costs even more, say 30% a year from 2020. Pros: keep your perpetual license, keep it up to date, retain previous version & home use rightsĬons: increasing costs, expect more unpleasant “persuasive” surprises from Autodesk Assuming you’re a perpetual license holder who has been paying annual maintenance, just keep doing what you have been doing, as long as you can.Īssumptions: maintenance cost 20% compound rise annually from 2020 Option 1 below is what I am using as my baseline for comparison. Others will want or need to keep their software up to date. If it works for you, go ahead and you may as well stop reading now. Pros: zero costs, keep your perpetual licenseĬons: don’t keep up to date, previous version & home use rights, reduced supportįor some of you, that option will seem suddenly quite attractive. Option 0 – drop maintenance, keep using AutoCAD It would be remiss of me to mention an even lower baseline that could be used: That may be generous to Autodesk, but time will tell. I’ve made the assumption that these will be 20% a year, compound. In order to compare costs beyond the short term, an assumption must be made about future maintenance price rises. No announcements have been made regarding the cost of maintenance from 2020 onwards, but it’s safe to say that Autodesk won’t be making life easy for its maintenance customers. The rises are compound, so the actual rises from the 2016 cost are 5%, 15.5% and 38.6%.

I’ll call this the 2016 cost.Īutodesk has announced that maintenance costs will rise by 5% in 2017, 10% in 2018 and 20% in 2019. Prior to Autodesk’s recent announcement, the annual maintenence cost to keep one copy of AutoCAD up to date was US$540 and the equivalent subscription (rental) cost was US$1680. Once I’ve gone through all the options, I’ll do a summary post that compares everything, but there are so many variables that a single post that covers all the options in adequate detail would be very long and complex.įirst, I need to describe what I’m using as the basis of my comparison. In this series of posts, I’ll examine various payment options for CAD software and compare them with the cost of staying on your Autodesk maintenance contract long-term. Note: due to new information from Autodesk, an updated summary has been posted.

Autodesk autocad 2020 price