$99: Alibre Drives Down the Cost of MCAD (Temporarily)

Ninety-nine bucks gets you a copy of Alibre Design, regular $999. So what do you get for this 90% discount?

Well, Autodesk and SolidWorks will give you a limited-time water-marked non-commercial-user version of their MCAD software, so Alibre marketing decided to instead let customers own the license.

I'm not sure when this offer ends, but I recall when Borland launched Turbo Pascal for $49 (w-a-a-y back in 1984) and blew the doors off Microsoft's slow $495 compilers.

More info here: www.alibre.com

Comments

[Jimmy Bergmark - JTB World]

Good old Turbo Pascal brings good memories but many years later I do use Microsoft's Visual Studio...

[tell]

mr. grayson just doesn't seem to get that it's not about price. they might as well have offered it for $9.99 or 99 cents, it doesn't really matter.

does anyone really believe that if "hundreds of thousands" of people used their free product and could never be enticed to buy with the multitude of half off, 2 for 1, 3 for 2, free this, half that, 2 of those and a free bag of chips offers, that now they will jump in droves to buy?

mr. grayson should start by respecting the market, and focusing on building a better product, rather than wasting time on another scheme.

but no, he tells us how "lucky" he is that he invested so much in building out his backend order processing system to accommodate the massive volume.

when you lose money on every sale you don't make it up in volume.

for anyone to really use a cad system they have to commit their time and effort and believe that it will pay off. this is the cost we're talking about, not $99, not $999, and not $4,000.

this is why solidworks continues to lead at a dramatically higher price. is your next design project and your business worth $99 or worth a few thousand?

alibre has not been able to convince people that the product is worth risking their time on, but now that it's only $99 they will?

my advice is to get back to work and don't gawk at the train wreck.