Software upgrade pricing strategies

Having been stung recently with a big servicing charge on my car, and being short on news this week, I thought I would do a survey of upgrade pricing strategies for different software companies.

Many people only look at the purchase price of software and do not consider the long term cost of buying into a technology. If you plan to stay up to date with new developments, compatible with other people using the same software, and compatible with future OSs and other technology, then you should also consider how much the software company will take from you tomorrow.

Today I will look at the upgrade route to staying up to date. (I will save service for another day). The survey is simple it is the upgrade fee from the most recently superseded version, as a percentage of the current purchase price. Where possible I have used US$ prices without special offers or discounts. When those were not available, I used Euro or GBP distributors prices.

The survey does not take into account how major the upgrade is or what the purchase price of the previous version was.

The results surprised me in their range. Here they are with the most painful first....

Matlab - not available (continous service renewal required)
TecPlot 360 80% (includes a year of maintenance sold separately for 15%)
TecPlot Focus 80% (includes year of maintenance sold separately for 20%)
O-Matrix 59%
Gauss 52%
Maple 50%
Mupad 50%
MathType 40% (from any previous version)
Scientific Word 35%
Scientific Workplace 35%
Endnote (download) 37%
Endnote physical box 33%
Minitab 33%
MathCAD 30%
Origin 27%
Mathematica 24%
Stata 18%

Caveat Emptor!