This just reminded me to uninstall Sublime Text 3 (paid license). I haven't used it in a very long time. Happy paying JetBrains annually for their tools.
Not doing this out of spite for the ST4 licensing nag --even though I didn't like it. By doing this they made me think whether or not I needed their product enough to pay for it again. The decision was clearly "no".
I'm posting this just as a note/through that might be useful to other software providers. Sometimes you force customers to re-evaluate if continuing to pay for your tools is worth their money.
I had a similar experience with Altium Designer this year. They sent me repeated emails as the $2000 annual maintenance fee due date approached. With this they forced me to take another look at KiCAD --something I had been looking at-- and realized it easily covers 95% or more of the designs we are doing. Paying for multiple AD licenses, in this context, makes no sense. We still get to use the last 2021 version and get to switch to KiCAD this year. And, yes, we will be donating to the KiCAD project on an annual basis. I believe in paying for good software when you want quality and continuing development (JetBrains being another example of this).
Now I am on the hunt for a good alternative for flow/thermal simulation for Solidworks. Anyone have any suggestions? It doesn't have to be free, just not the cost of a small car and lock you into ridiculous annual maintenance fees. We have FloWorks, which dates back a few years, and works fine. If we can upgrade to a better tool for a reasonable per-seat license I'd go for it.
Not doing this out of spite for the ST4 licensing nag --even though I didn't like it. By doing this they made me think whether or not I needed their product enough to pay for it again. The decision was clearly "no".
I'm posting this just as a note/through that might be useful to other software providers. Sometimes you force customers to re-evaluate if continuing to pay for your tools is worth their money.
I had a similar experience with Altium Designer this year. They sent me repeated emails as the $2000 annual maintenance fee due date approached. With this they forced me to take another look at KiCAD --something I had been looking at-- and realized it easily covers 95% or more of the designs we are doing. Paying for multiple AD licenses, in this context, makes no sense. We still get to use the last 2021 version and get to switch to KiCAD this year. And, yes, we will be donating to the KiCAD project on an annual basis. I believe in paying for good software when you want quality and continuing development (JetBrains being another example of this).
Now I am on the hunt for a good alternative for flow/thermal simulation for Solidworks. Anyone have any suggestions? It doesn't have to be free, just not the cost of a small car and lock you into ridiculous annual maintenance fees. We have FloWorks, which dates back a few years, and works fine. If we can upgrade to a better tool for a reasonable per-seat license I'd go for it.