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 December 20, 2025 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.

[DRAWZILLA]

Fyi, you can still keep paying your ssa fee instead of going to the higher subscription fee. Just don't let it lapse or you lose it. You will also get the latest version.

[Rich_Winsor]

Also FYI, if you expect to keep using Chief

you can request a 2 year renewal of your

SSA. You have to call sales to request this.

This offers you a chance to be locked in for

an extra year if they decide to raise the price

of the SSA next year. 

 

[winterdd]

On 1/10/2026 at 3:12 PM, DRAWZILLA said:

Fyi, you can still keep paying your ssa fee instead of going to the higher subscription fee. Just don't let it lapse or you lose it. You will also get the latest version.

Us guys who use this for a living can only hope being grandfathered in and paying the SSA before it lapses every year will never change. I do not have time nor the energy to learn new software or god forbid go back to the stone age and use AutoCad. CA is built for speed and I like it. I'm 48 and still have a ways to go before retirement so there is just no telling what can happen over the next 20 years. 

[Renerabbitt]

Man, I am tired of this topic, but I’ve seen it come up a lot—and I do browse the boards regularly. I find these posts deeply lacking in both understanding and compassion. For those of us whose careers Chief has quite literally enabled, we are SO GRATEFUL. For anyone here, the subscription model has been around for years, so this person likely meant to post in the Home Talk forum which just changed to subscription for the HD 2026 software version.
Also, grass isn't greener:
 

• Autodesk Revit — subscription-only

• AutoCAD / AutoCAD Architecture — subscription-only

• SketchUp Pro (current versions) — subscription-only

• SoftPlan Professional (current versions) — subscription-only

• Cedreo — subscription-only

• RoomSketcher Pro — subscription-only

• Coohom Professional — subscription-only

• Planner 5D Professional — subscription-only

• Archicad--Subscription only

 

Imagine picking a vendor over 10 years ago and praying they stay relevant over the years—no, over the decades. I get it: you want your developer to survive by taking a thousand chances that the fleeting consumer will buy into the next version, constantly gambling on how much development budget they can allocate so you won’t complain that the feature set isn’t exactly what you wanted. What a miserable experience it must be to have such ungrateful customers—customers who apparently don’t want you to eat.
 

I challenge any consumer making these claims about the subscription model to go develop a product for a consumer base and then try to guess the magic number needed to fund the next iteration. I dumped roughly $108K into development of my next product this year, and it was frightening—just guessing what numbers you might realistically hit.
 

There is a reason Vail Resorts constantly raises day-ticket prices while keeping season passes comparatively low: it’s far easier to budget for planned improvements when you have fixed, predictable numbers. This isn’t a cash grab or corporate bullying—it’s necessary. They are in their fourth year of trying to develop a cloud service for us customers, while doing everything they can to keep SSA costs low, all while dodging a million cloud-computing copyrights and trademarks.

And speaking of inflation—to those who think it’s worth mentioning—think back for a second and answer me this: has the price of this product tracked with inflation over the years?

Not even close.

Also, last I checked, subscriptions are fully deductible, while purchased-to-own software is a capital expense that typically requires depreciation. It’s literally a write-off—so why is anyone complaining?

 

This whole debate reminds me of how difficult it is to promote a professional product on Amazon, where you can’t qualify the customer and someone trashes your product with a bad review because the delivery driver dented the box.

I have consistently saved more in efficiency from each version’s feature set than I have paid in SSA, year over year, for the last 10 years, and my prices have gone up at a rate greater than the cost of this software.
Historical data from X17 alone showed roughly a 20% efficiency improvement for me. Keep going, Chief—I owe you.

Edited 10 hours ago by Renerabbitt

[Renerabbitt]

I understand the desire for more frequent patches under a subscription model, but I don’t think that expectation aligns with how this software—or this company—actually operates.

Chief isn’t a lightweight or modular app where features can be pushed live with minimal downstream impact. It’s a professional production tool built on nearly 30 years of accumulated code, with an ecosystem that’s tightly coupled to documentation, training, and support. Every feature change or behavioral adjustment ripples far beyond just the executable.

Frequent incremental patches would require:

• Updating Help documentation and knowledge-base articles continuously

• Retraining support staff so they can correctly diagnose issues per patch version

• Updating internal training materials and SSA workflows

• Preparing trainers for live classes, webinars, and year-round training events

• Managing version fragmentation across users on different patch levels

That kind of cadence would almost certainly increase confusion, not reduce it. Support would be flooded with “what changed?” calls, trainees would be following outdated instructions, and users collaborating across offices would constantly be out of sync. For a company whose business model is support-centric, that’s a serious risk.

On top of that, it’s easy to forget that every change to the professional product must also be evaluated, segmented, and deliberately restricted across the Home Designer product line. Features can’t simply be “turned on” everywhere. They have to be gated, versioned, documented, and supported differently depending on the SKU. That alone adds significant overhead to every single update.

There’s also the reality of cross-team development. Many features don’t live in isolation—they depend on work being done in other development areas. You can’t safely release Feature A if it’s meant to integrate with Feature B, when the team responsible for Feature B hasn’t completed or stabilized their code for the next major version yet. Releasing partial integrations mid-cycle is a recipe for instability and technical debt.

Chief’s development model is regimented for a reason. Features are bundled, documented, trained, and supported as cohesive units—not dripped out in isolation. That discipline is what allows them to support an enormous range of users with consistency and reliability. Breaking that rhythm just to satisfy a “faster updates” expectation would undermine the very thing people rely on Chief for: stability.

Comparisons to AI software or modern SaaS tools also miss the mark. Most of those platforms are cloud-native, modular, and not burdened by decades of legacy workflows—or real-world production liability. Chief operates in a completely different category. The cost of instability here isn’t a bad UI tweak—it’s lost time, broken workflows, and real-world consequences.

Subscription doesn’t automatically mean “ship everything immediately.” In this case, it means predictable funding for long-term development, structured releases, and a support ecosystem that actually knows what it’s supporting. That’s not falling behind the future—that’s respecting the complexity of the present.

If anything, I’m far more impressed that Chief manages to evolve at all while maintaining a system this disciplined, with documentation, training, and support moving in lockstep. That’s something very few software companies—AI-driven or otherwise—are capable of doing well.
BTW Chief, if you are reading this, despite my grandstanding brand ambassador post here, its about dang time for that X18 Beta...you can see we are all getting a bit twitchy?

Edited 10 hours ago by Renerabbitt

[winterdd]

11 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

For those of us whose careers Chief has quite literally enabled, we are SO GRATEFUL.

 

100% agree.........when you really learn the program, your turn around times on each project get better and better. What used to take me over a week to model a complex home now takes a day or two. Invest and buy good computers (another write off) and clients will love the renderings produced and make you stand out from other competitors.