Autodesk Pay As You Go Licensing

Some of you may not have noticed that Autodesk announced their Pay As You Go licensing last week. It is available from the 16th of September 2013 on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis (with the option to renew). This is effectively a rental plan which is offered as a low cost buy in alternative to the traditional perpetual license. Autodesk claim that the rental options will provide similar benefits to current subscription customers.

Apparently availability varies by country, so if you are outside the US (their pricing plan can be found here) you’ll just have to wait and see whether it will be offered and how much it will cost you. And before you go thinking that you can purchase a cheap US license for use elsewhere, you can’t. Check out the FAQs for more information including which software and suites are being offered.

It’s interesting to note that all of the rental options are available directly from Autodesk, with only the yearly and quarterly options also available through resellers. Licenses are named user licenses, meaning there is no network licensing option, the license is directly tied to an Autodesk ID. So it may be useful for scaling purposes, but until I see the prices for my local country (which I already know I won’t be happy with, compared to US costs!) and do a more thorough comparison with perpetual + subscription costs, it’s not clear what the impact will be. It’s worth mentioning that Autodesk claim that there aren’t any plans to withdraw the traditional licensing option any time soon.

Will the ability to rent Revit lead to a betterRevit for you?

Heads up via Tom de Plater.