birneyd

I think you are at the core of the issue. The S and the SA need to be separated for CA to keep their user base. A lot of comments here from casual users like myself who have been diligently paying the SSA but are offended by the price of the rental model. A far better solution would be to charge a sensible fee for the SA part (i.e. development) and then work out a schedule that makes the S (support) part pay for itself. A combination of per call, and a few call packages (i.e. 10, 50, 200) should cover the bases. Software support is expensive, particularly for vertical market SW that, by definition, never gets tested to the degree that mass market SW does. I have to believe that Support is a big chunk of CA's budget (maybe more than half), so cost-plus-margin based pricing makes sense. Make the support function pay its way. The alternative will be an eventual loss of all casual users and judging by the comment base, that may well be the majority. One has to wonder if this change isn't just a knee jerk reaction to the housing market going in the dumper. If so, a better choice would be to accept reality and downsize accordingly. The market is going to be in the dumper for at least a few years. Economic cycles (particularly forced ones) don't heal very quickly. The announced path suggests that either CA is desperate or suddenly very greedy. There has been no evidence of extreme greed in the past, so maybe desperate is the logical conclusion.

Somehow, I don't think that means that if you use the program for a day a month that one month's rent will now last for 30 months. Having to choke up $200 every time you want to visit a plan is not workable.

Yes, annoying, but I think still better than going through the hassle of restarting the program and coughing up $200 for a month of use when you just want to make a minor change to a plan. A rental model would be workable, but only at a sensible price. 5 copies of MS Office for $100 per year is reasonable. Adobe's photo plan at $10 per month is actually quite cheap. Even the full boat Creative Cloud at $50 per month isn't too bad a deal when you look at the expanse of software involved. By comparison $200 per month for a single program is highway robbery. I get the (small) vertical market issue, but there should be a way around for folks who use the program on a limited basis. One approach would be to charge separately for support as I suspect that is a big piece of CA's cost structure. Support plans at different levels from basically none to as many calls as you need (essentially the current model) could be priced very differently with nominal pricing on the software itself. With that kind of model, the current SSA pricing should easily support development. Support is another animal and the high intensity users really ought to pay their way. With the currently proposed plan, most of the casual users will eventually go away and CA will lose considerable revenue that incrementally costs them very little to support.

I have many of the same concerns. I have used Chief primarily for my own home construction (at x14 and started well before they had "x" versions). I have found CA very useful for visualization, but not very practical for detailed structural design because it is simply too automatic and doesn't deal well with unique structure designs. For example, our house uses drop trusses for 2nd and 3rd floors and Chief insisted (at least at the time) on using rim joists. I patched around the issue for the 3d view and made a lovely set of visuals, but still had to draw all the structural cross sections in a 2D CAD program (Visual CADD is my program of choice). I don't think that has changed much over the years. I still keep CA active as the house is a continually evolving beast and I try to keep the plan up to date. I also occasionally draw plans for neighbors' projects so they can see what they are going to get with a planned remodel, but CA is not a revenue generator for me. I will probably keep the SSA alive until or unless CA prices it beyond good sense, but I unconditionally dislike (maybe even hate) the rental model. In my view, it is much like phone plans that are where they are because the phone companies are either too lazy or too stupid to manage their businesses based on usage revenue. If CA is bent on going to the rental model, then my suggestion would be to add an additional feature that allows the program to be loaded for a nominal fee and bills by hours used (the license activator connects to mommy in any case). That would allow for casual users to have access to the program and potentially increase the user base beyond the high-output pro base that will be the only users left with the current new model.