We are often asked to comment on the value of BricsCAD maintenance renewal by perpetual license holders.
Firstly, BricsCAD maintenance provides you with:
• Automatic access to all product updates and major BricsCAD releases.
• Fast priority support (typically next business day response) on issues raised via the Bricsys support system.
• Support on the last three major versions. Bricsys will still support you if you're not ready to install the latest release and will search for workarounds on issues raised.
For more details around this please see our post on BricsCAD maintenance agreement - Definition.
Following an initial perpetual license purchase or upgrade, annual maintenance is optional from the second year on. So apart from the benefits outlined above, why should perpetual license holders renew their BricsCAD maintenance?
The most common considerations around maintenance renewal are:
• You have an ongoing need to be able to utilise BricsCAD as part of your business operations. As such it is a strategic advantage to have access to the latest features that come with each new release.
• You want to ensure you can access fixes to issues found in BricsCAD. Bug fixes are always applied to future updates of BricsCAD, they are never applied retrospectively.
• You run 3rd party applications or complimentary applications. These applications typically only maintain access to the most recent releases of BricsCAD. Having maintenance gives peace of mind that you can continue to access them.
Having determined that you have an ongoing need to utilise BricsCAD, then you will find the biggest advantage to annual maintenance with your perpetual license is cost. From the initial purchase of a perpetual BricsCAD license (or upgrade) renewing your maintenance annually is generally the cheapest option to keep your BricsCAD up to date. Yes, it is an option to not renew your maintenance annually and instead upgrade at some point in the future. This choice is a key benefit to perpetual license ownership. However, this approach tends to be more expensive over time. Further to this it creates spikes in your cashflow as you have to pay a larger amount in one hit rather than smaller amounts spread out over time.
To illustrate this, we've prepared the following graphs looking at the annual and total expenditure of a single user license of BricsCAD Pro starting with its initial purchase, then considering different options to keep this license up to date over subsequent years. You will see that the option for annual maintenance has the smallest and most consistent annual outlay. Furthermore, it has the lowest expenditure costs over time.
If you have questions regarding your BricsCAD maintenance. Please get in contact. We are more than happy to go through your options.