The new policy is a complete change of direction by Topaz and violates the assurance we were given by the company of free upgrades for life. I understand Topaz wanting to switch to a new pricing model but this is a ham handed way to make the change. Topaz, in my view, has left itself open to a class action lawsuit. It might be a good policy for the long term but it was poorly executed. Topaz should honor their commitments to those of us that bought programs with the promise of free upgrades.
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Of course I read what was written. Do you need to spend upwards of $400 up front to purchase Photoshop before you pay 100 a year to use it?
Not everyone has bought everything.
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Eric
Tough part first
Topaz is a great product - but this is my second sudden transition.
I paid about $300 for Studio and it’s related apps - then, with no notice, came Studio 2 and AI.
Most AI were ‘free’ upgrades I bought one or two that were questionable as I owned the earlier ‘analog’ versions but I played along as they went on sale …
But I would never have paid another $300 to, in essence, start over… or stay now if fixes become ‘upgrades.’
A growing concern is the very limited tool base in the individual applications. Logically Studio 2 and Adjust AI should be one app - not two. And why should Denoise AI or JPEG AI be freestanding? Gigapixel is a terrific app - and you can scale the image but not crop?
My fear has always been that Topaz would get grabbed up by a conglomerate, so I am 100% behind your efforts to keep the company on solid financial ground… but to survive long term you gotta get through the short term - to do that I think there’s some homework ahead.
All the Best
Charles
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Thank you for your dedication to giving us the best products. You make my photos look professional. Your support team is exceptional and is always ready to provide solutions and quick responses.
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Question on this model: How long will each upgrade cycle be supported - If a bug hasn’t been fixed within 3 to 6 months after release should we expect that it just won’t be fixed because your dev team is too busy with the next release cycle? Or will the crash and bug fixes go into the next major GM release that everybody can install and just the new functions will be feature gated with a pay wall? If you’re releasing major features or paid upgrades as dot releases as indicated in your update letter here, then it sounds like we shouldn’t expect any bug fix updates once a paid release has been delivered to us in the wild?
Whether it’s an entirely new product or just fixing bugs, improving performance and answering to code debt; there’s always a reason that the old product isn’t going to get any love. Personally I’d rather pay a subscription and trust that you’re allocating engineering resources to balance all of that in the best interest of your customers - meaning I keep paying and I keep getting stable, performant software that keeps up with or reinvents the marketplace.
Good software is always worth paying for and there’s no way to continue developing and enhancing it if there’s no revenue being generated from the invested time and resources.
My personal frustration with Topaz softwares has been the tendency to build a whole new product and abandon the old ones. With Topaz that has often meant an entirely different interface that I have to learn all over again, and some of the functions I loved in the old FX Lab plugins no longer exist in Topaz Studio; or if they do exist I can’t figure out where the hell they’re hidden (such as the smooth/detail brush - I loved that thing). Staying with the same codebase and interface (within reason), improving features and performance on top of the tool that I love and have invested time to learn to use - these are things that will make me happy and make me use it more often too.
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Hello Eric -
I purchased the Black Friday sale bundle in November, 2019. Your products are decent but your upgrade pricing, which is more like an upgrade subscription, are ridiculous. I pay Adobe a little more per year ($120). For that I get Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Cloud, Photoshop, 20GB of cloud storage, an online portfolio, access to iOS apps and more. How do you justify a compatible annual fee when your products do not do raw processing, DAM, non-destructive edits, offer no iOS apps or anything more than updates. No, sir. At $100, the Topaz suite is a diminishing investment.
At the time of my purchase, I was promised free updates for life. Now you’ve changed your mind. So have I and I would like my $300 refunded, which is still priced high until the free updates are factored in. You should have amortized the initial purchase cost more efficiently. To come back after the deal is done an break your word does not instill trust in you, your ability to lead a company or the company itself.
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I can’t say I’m surprised or mad since I think I got my money’s worth (long-time customer).
I think the $50 per product upgrade is a bit steep, but the $99 account-wide charge is reasonable (I own everything but Video AI).
But, a lot will depend on the veracity of the announcement . . . meaning, will there be substantial improvements under this new business model?
Others have mentioned onOne (which I owned until 2018). They started doing updates every year but the stuff they were adding was of no value added and often messed up existing stuff that was working fine. I still use their 2010 for color processing and their 2009 for B&W.
Same with Topaz. Studio 1 is more useful to me than Studio 2. A few of the AI “updates” seemed transparent (as in, I couldn’t see an improvement).
Which brings me to a question: will I be able to reload versions I own even if they aren’t the latest versions?
Meaning, if I buy a new PC, will I be able to load products I own even if I haven’t upgraded to the latest versions? I ask because you switched to an online installer and I no longer see the option to download an offline install file.
Thanks, and for now I will trust you’ll do better than other software companies (until I have proof otherwise).
ejd
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This is so sad. I am on a very low fixed income (retired) and I LOVE my Topaz products. Over the years - how many - since the 1990s probably I have made the effort to purchase most all of the software, most of the Studio effects, and all of the new AI things. I am distressed to hear that I will now have to buy them again and again and again until I stop using it or die, whichever comes first. I understand the corporate mentality here but too bad you are joining the screw the customer movement.
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Thanks but no thanks Topaz… I’m done . You release way too many updates too quickly and they’re full of bugs, crashes and mistakes and now you expect your customers to pay for them? Get real.
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I understand your position, but I do feel betrayed. Like many others have expressed, the purchase price was reasonable given the promise of free updates for lifetime. Without the upgrades, not so reasonable, particularly given the reliability of the software in the recent past. If you are going to change the conditions that you sold the software under, then perhaps you need to give everyone the opportunity to have their software bought back by Topaz. I do not believe that the new $100 per year is really a good investment. I guess I saw this coming when you switched from the individual plugins to the Studio, which needed to be bought again, then switched back to individual programs that were bought again, and now this. Needless to say, I am not a happy camper.
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I agree, not sure where the good news is in this story. I understand you need to make a profit and that is fair. For the consumer, it just means, do you want it enough to pay for it? I think the upgrade price by default is high considering it is unknown what the upgrade will be.
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I understand the need of a company to be financially sound, but, for those who have been here for some time, under the free upgrade guarantee, I would think a grandfather clause would help keep you from loosing business and those loyal users referrals. Even Weebly offered a really good grandfather clause with incentives added to those who helped start them off.
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While I understand a business has to make decisions to be successful, it is not the consumers responsibility to make or agree with those decisions. Topaz has always advertised free upgrades for life on their products. This was a factor in my decision to purchase all of the products being discussed. For those who bought these products prior to this decision, I believe the company should continue to honor their original marketing commitment. If the company is unwilling to do this, then those consumers who already own the product should at the very least get a full year of free upgrades from the change in policy date regardless of when the product was purchased.
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Eric,
I believe the issue of the RAW profiles not having been imported to DeNoise AI 2 is still pending. I purchased mine a couple of weeks ago, exporting to any other format than JPEG renders the images too light. I am not sure if this has been taken care of in recent days.
I purchased your software in part because of the free lifetime upgrades. This represented a contract. I suggest you give serious consideration to grandfathering those who purchased under that agreement. Your software was not cheap although I found it to be excellent. Please don’t tarnish your reputation. Topaz has become top shelf. Please keep it that way.
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I really appreciate the software that has been developed. It has greatly helped me to improve my finished product. I completely understand and appreciate the need to generate revenue to maintain the business going forward. This direction and announcement though is of zero benefit to the user community at large as purported.
Topaz has entered into “breech of contract” with each and every user. The contract upon purchase was “free upgrades for life”. Even at this moment the website still reflects this language. This language needs to be immediately removed from each instance on your website.
To receive even incremental upgrades (Gigapixel v5.2 to v5.3 to site your own example) users will now have to pay for those releases, even if that release is a bug fix or making the software function as promised. Releases have typically been fairly rough with improvement over time. As a user, I was not so concerned because of the upgrade promise.
Perhaps the “upgrade” charge should apply to major change releases (V1, V2, V3) only and not incremental releases that could simply be fixes. I think that would be an easier pill to swallow for the user community.
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I’m only referring to Windows 7 AND Skylake-X CPUs - not only AI lineup from Topaz refuses to work in that system with such CPU, but also waifu2x-caffe scaler, for example. But since Topaz is fixing this bug - it’s going to be better soon.
The value with Topaz was the ongoing updates. Being charged for new updates after buying a program is a no go with me. Unless this policy changes, I will not be doing any more business with Topaz labs. You show great promise with your products, but at this time, they are very resource needy (I had to upgrade to an Nvidia Titan Xp to run Sharpen Ai, and it uses everything that card can provide.) I can’t even run the program on my laptop (Dell XPS 15) The software is not cheap, and being gouged a second time for an update is highway robbery. Claiming that you are providing the user more “value” by charging for upgrades is not a value to anyone other than a greedy corporate company. I’ve already told Adobe to jump off a cliff (I will never pay that company another dime. I’ll use less user friendly editing software over paying for their ransomware.)
For people from this point on who buy software from you, sure, go ahead and charge them, for the rest of us who already have the software and bought it because the upgrades were free, you should honor the agreement of free for life.
I hope you reverse your decision. Otherwise I feel you will lose many customers (myself included) and I can’t recommend your software to others.
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I purchased two products… DeNoise and Sharpen. I found the price was high for such limited functionality but the lifetime upgrade policy tipped the scale. Now the scale has tipped back. A clear case of bait and switch. Please send me a prorated refund. It’s just not worth $100 per year.
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I agree.
So, please add a Prefs option asap to all products where you can configure whether you want the Topaz app to check for updates (or not). Nothing is more annoying than to not want to upgrade, but still have to answer No every time you start the app when there is an update available that you don’t want (yet). None of my numerous other apps have this annoyance which can’t be turned off.
Thanks.
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