Just a few minutes ago, I followed a link to an interesting survey about SolidWorks packaging and pricing. I’m not sure how long this survey has been going on, to be honest, so I apologize if you have already seen it or heard about it before, but it was news for me. I had included a link to it, but they told me that was my personal link and I’ve already taken the survey. You can access this survey from the Customer Portal or through the task pane, in the SolidWorks Resources tab,  you’ll find a link among the news under Community.

Basically, the survey makes you choose among different combos of functionality for the three different seats currently available in SolidWorks: standard, professional and premium. First they show you descriptions of three options for each seat, including the “as is” option, and two others that include some extra functionality and/or take away some other goodies, like photo-realistic rendering in professional and premium, or Simulation capabilities. There’s also a description of a stand-alone solution for photo-realistic rendering and presentation, and some stand-alone solutions for simulation, that I guess you could buy separately or together with your seat of SolidWorks, if you choose.   A brief description of similar products offered by AutoDesk follows.

Next, they ask you to choose from a list of possible choices which one you would prefer the most and which one the least. The choices include options such as SolidWorks Professional #1 with photo realistic rendering option (the standalone) for “X” amount of money or AutoDesk Inventor Suite for “Y” amount of money, for instance.  This part is a little tricky, though, but at least you have the cheat sheet available to check again what was supposed to be offered with each option.  However, unless you are very familiar with AutoDesk products, you can’t be really sure from their super-brief description of what functionality is exactly offered and how the price would compare.  Also, I’m not sure these prices included maintenance fees. I don’t think they did. Some of them seemed a bit too expensive to me, considering all that had been taken off the original license.

Part of me really hopes this means there will be a more affordable way to purchase a license of SolidWorks in the not so distant future, although there’s also the other part of me, the realistic one, that thinks it’s better not to hold my breath on this one.  It would be cool, though. I can think of a few bells and whistles I could certainly do without, but only as long as it really helps the price go down substantially. If you are going to end up paying almost the same as for the “as is” version, then it’s not worth it. What would be really cool is if you could buy some basic, affordable seat and then grow it by modules as you need, instead of having to upgrade to something twice as expensive and full of functionality you may never really use. While I’m in dreamland, it would be nice if they lowered the maintenance fees too.  Well, dreaming is cheap, right? Waking up to reality, now that’s the hard part. J