Alibre Blog

Alibre Clarifies Support Options for New Customers

All new Alibre Design customers, including those purchasing Alibre Design Standard for $99, are eligible for “Installation and Getting Started” support during the 30 days immediately following purchase. 

All customers are also encouraged to purchase Maintenance along with their version of Alibre Design, as it provides valuable additional support and software update options. Maintenance prices are $299 for Alibre Design Standard, $349 for Aibre Design Professional, and $399 for Alibre Design Expert.

Customers must be on active maintenance to receive periodic software updates and new version releases. Customers on active maintenance also receive technical support via telephone, email, and the Internet for a period of one year.

Alibre typically releases one major software version update per year and several minor updates. The current release version number is V11.2, which indicates that Alibre Design has been updated twice since the initial release of V11.

Alibre Design V12 is currently in the final stages of development and testing and should be released in several weeks. You can see detailed information about V12 at http://www.alibre.com/v12sneakpeek.

Finally, we are pleased to announce that customers who purchase during the $99 Alibre Design Standard Promotion are eligible for free “Instructor Led” Online Training Seminars and can sign up at https://www.alibre.com/training_support/requestwebinar.aspx. There is no charge for these webinars during their first 30 days.

Alibre $99 Price Offer Stuns the CAD Industry

"There’s a 'new normal' now where people are saving more, consuming less, and being more frugal and thoughtful in their purchases."

Mark Duke, Wal-Mart President and CEO

It may seem a bit unusual for a CAD company to quote the CEO of Wal-Mart, but these are unusual times and Alibre is no ordinary CAD company.

Our $99 offer caught the competition flatfooted and woke up a sleepy CAD industry dozing at the end of a long hot summer.

Customer and industry response has been incredible and the buzz has been extraordinary. All of the major CAD bloggers and several major CAD publications have picked up the story. It has been very interesting to see the CAD blogging community emerge and take on the dual roles of real-time news reporting and independent analysis.

Their headlines pretty much say it all:

Alibre's Ridiculous Offer - Scott Wertel's Harangue

Everything in the Entire World Marked Down to $99… Including Alibre Design – SolidSmack, Josh Mings

Alibre $99 Pricing Sends Shockwave – CAD Insider, Roopinder Tara

$99 for parametric 3D history-based CAD? Now that’s negotiating! – Dezignstuff, Matt Lombard

$99 Alibre Design Standard Opens the Era of Retail MCAD - Maybe - CADCAMNet, Randall Newton

Alibre Slashes Price by 90% - Desktop Engineering, Kenneth Wong

$99: Alibre Drives Down the Cost of MCAD (Temporarily) – WorldCAD Access, Ralph Grabowski

Alibre Design Standard for $99 – Deelip.com, Deelip Menezes
Alibre Makes $99 CAD Offer – Design News, Beth Stackpole

Alibre CEO, J. Paul Grayson, Discusses the New Pricing Structure – Novedge, Franco Folini

Alibre Cuts 3D CAD Price to $99 – Cadalyst Calls on Vendors to Clarify Overall Software Costs – Cadalyst, Nancy Spurling Johnson

Customers are expressing their appreciation by email, phone and with the ultimate compliment, a credit card purchase. As I write, we are scrambling to meet demand and the “Cha-ching” of $99 sales is echoing from our web store into my email inbox.

Many great companies and innovative designers bought in the last week. In many cases, they bought multiple seats or upgraded to Alibre Design Professional or Expert, and bought maintenance, training and other add-ons.

Most opinions are positive, but there is a smattering of negative reaction. The negatives comments seem to fall in three categories:

1. They are desperate; this is the last act before they go out of business.
2. They announced this without forethought, and their reseller partners are against it, because they can’t make money on it either.
3. This is nothing new, low-ball price offers have been tried and failed in the CAD industry before.

We anticipated that people would say that we were desperate. But seriously,  we honed our business model to be profitable giving away free software. How hard can it be for us to make money by charging for it? We are profitable; cash flow positive, debt-free and have been self-funded since 2001.

We started discussing the $99 offer concept about 90 days ago. We held internal discussions, including vigorous debate. Part of that debate included surveying our VAR’s; we have over 100, most of them outside of the United States. We have greater participation from our VAR’s for the $99 offer, than any special offer we ever made.

We are near, or at the bottom of the “Greatest Recession” since The Great Depression, which means that Alibre’s $99 offer comes at the time when it is most needed and the time that it is most appreciated. Customers and companies have become frugal, for the first time they pushing back against the exorbitant prices they have been paying for 3D CAD. 10’s of thousands of customers have delayed new seat purchases or let their maintenance contracts lapse. This may be the best time in the history of CAD software to make such an offer.

No one, least of all the big CAD companies, are publically defending their pricing or refuting Alibre’s ability to get the job done. I bet they are just keeping their mouth’s shut and hoping it goes away.

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall at SolidWorks, Autodesk, or PTC’s headquarters. What are they thinking? What about the VAR’s? They must really hate this. I wonder how many have had deals killed when their prospects buy Alibre Design, saving them $3-5K PER SEAT in the process. At a minimum you can bet their prospects are demanding and receiving BIG discounts if they decide to stick with the incumbent.

There was a quote attributed to Bill Gates during the Desktop PC Software wars between Microsoft, Lotus, Wordperfect, and Borland. He was reported to say, “I count every application software dollar that we sell as being worth two dollars, the dollar that Microsoft gets and the dollar that Lotus doesn’t.” Using this math every $99 dollar sale we make is worth $5099 dollars, the $99 we get and the $5000 that the customer gets to keep.

Alibre Challenges CAD Industry to Beat $99 Price Offer

Today we are proud to announce the boldest marketing initiative in the history of 3D CAD - making professional grade 3D CAD software, including parts, assemblies, and drafting, available to anyone for under $100. We are challenging the entire CAD industry to meet or beat this very aggressive $99 single seat price offer.

This is a limited time offer on Alibre Design Standard, which normally retails for $999. Alibre Design Standard is our core technology platform, and it provides a complete parametric toolset for unlimited 3D part and assembly design and 2D drafting. Capable of creating complex mechanical designs with thousands of components, full assembly motion, automatic 2D drawing updates, and many other benefits.

 

The technology is virtually identically to that offered by Autodesk Inventor, Dassault SolidWorks, Siemens Solidedge, and PTC’s Pro/Engineer. And those products normally cost $5,000 and more per seat.

 

This is a very interesting time in the CAD software market, with most customers canceling or delaying new seat purchases because of the economy. These high-price CAD companies have reported 40% or higher declines in new seat sales and have become increasingly dependent on maintenance and services revenue from their existing customers. For example, PTC recently reported that over 80% of the revenue in their most recent quarters is coming from existing customers.

 

In addition, the manufacturing industry has been hit very hard by lay offs, plant closings, and business failures. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing related employees have lost their jobs. In response, both Autodesk and SolidWorks have announced “Stimulus” offers that provide free, but very limited license, educational versions of their design software to unemployed engineers. These licenses do not allow any commercial use and come with other time limit and usage restrictions.

 

Given this backdrop, and what we perceive to be the beginnings of a turn in the market, we have decided to launch a massive “market share grab” directly targeting the largest CAD software companies in their weakest spot, new seat sales of multi-thousand dollar design tools. High-end design tools have been ridiculously expensive for some time, but in this environment companies and individuals have become much more frugal.

 

Hence our $99 offer. This is the full-blown deal that will open up the market in a way that has never been attempted before. Tens of thousands of people are in the same boat right now; they need CAD software but can’t afford multi-thousand dollar software. Many companies have canceled or suspended purchases of new CAD seats to preserve their bottom lines. Manufacturing companies have been hit especially hard and thousands of talented engineers are out of work. Whatever the case, long story short is that people are not buying new seats of $5,000 plus CAD software. Not SolidWorks, not Inventor, not Pro/E or anyone else.

Getting a full 3D CAD license for $99 completely changes the game for these people and completely changes the game for CAD vendors. The best part is people that take advantage of this offer can use this product to make money. And we want them to. That's the point.

Individuals and businesses can learn about the deal at www.alibre.com.