Over a Decade of Loyalty Ends With Forced Subscription Model

[Kjack427]

Dear Chief Architect Team,

 

I am writing as a long-time customer who has used Chief Architect products continuously since 2014. Over more than a decade, I have invested not only money, but also significant time learning your software, building workflows, and recommending it to others.

 

Unfortunately, the recent move away from a purchase-to-own upgrade model to a subscription-only model is a hard no for me.

I want to be very clear: I will not subscribe.This decision is not impulsive, nor is it based on price alone. It is rooted in a fundamental disagreement with subscription-only licensing for professional software, especially when it replaces an ownership model that customers relied on for years.

 

Here are the core reasons many consumers, myself included strongly reject subscriptions:

• Loss of ownership  Customers no longer own the tools they paid to learn and depend on. Access becomes conditional, not guaranteed.
• Forced recurring costs  Subscriptions shift financial risk entirely onto the user, often resulting in higher long-term costs for the same functionality.
• Price escalation and “upgrade inflation”  Subscription pricing almost always increases over time, with no meaningful increase in value to justify it.
• Vendor lock-in  Users are effectively strong-armed into continued payment to maintain access to their own work and files.
• Punishing loyalty  Long-term customers who supported the product for years are given fewer choices, not more.
• Erosion of trust  When a company removes purchase options entirely, it signals that customer preference is no longer a priority.

 

In today’s market especially in the rapidly evolving world of AI-assisted design, this approach is one of the fastest ways to lose customer goodwill. Consumers increasingly want transparency, flexibility, and respect for choice. Subscription-only models deliver the opposite.

 

To be clear, my refusal to subscribe does not come from a lack of alternatives. There are many competitive architectural and home-design platforms available today. I would rather invest my time learning a new tool than reinvest further in a product that eliminates ownership and replaces it with mandatory recurring fees.That is a disappointing conclusion to reach after more than a decade of loyalty.

 

I want to emphasize how genuinely disappointed I am in this direction for Chief Architect Home Designer Architectural. Clearly myself and many other long time users valued the ability to purchase upgrades outright, own the version we paid for, and choose when and if an upgrade made sense for our work. That flexibility was part of what made your product worth investing in. 

 

Unless a purchase-to-own upgrade option returns, my long-standing relationship with this software ends here.

I hope you take this feedback seriously, please realize I am far from the only customer who feels this way.

Sincerely,
Kj

Edited Saturday at 12:29 PM by Kjack427
spelling

[Rich_Winsor]

I feel your pain and not to be flip, but what "purchase to own"

options with Chief's capabilities are there really available to us

at this point. Subscriptions have become the way of life. For

Pete's sake my Primary Health Care Physician has put me on

a subscription service. I now pay him whether I'm in need of 

his services or not. Seems like a big stretch of the Hippocratic  

Oath and I don't think Chief took any oaths. Resistance is futile.

 

 

[Designers_Ink]

I just wish now that we are on a subscription, they would stop with the 12 to 18 month big update releases.  Work on a a new function, test it out, and give it to us as soon as it is ready.  There are obviously going to be some improvements needed for the Managed system (like not having to export and import every time we share a file with a co-worker who is working on the same project).  We shouldn't have to wait 18 months for something to make it better.  With AI software updates moving at lightning pace, Chief will have to put out updates faster to keep up with the future.