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Maintenance fees

cityjack

New member
Morning all,

We currently have 1 seat of Wildfire 5.0 and a bunch of SolidWorks seats. The IT dept here is trying to phase out Pro/E much to my dismay. She is using the justification that it costs 15K per year to keep 1 seat on maintenance? Is she correct? I think we just have a basic foundation license also.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated as I cannot get any support from PTC right now.

Thanks

Sid
 
It sounds like the IT department doesn't want to mess with one oddball seat of software - one more bill to pay, one more piece of software they have to install, maintain, etc. It's my understanding that maintenance should be about $2500 for a basic seat. I don't pay the bills, I just know what I have heard in the past. I think a license for a basic seat of Creo and one years maintenance is under $10,000. I'd ask to see the receipts. If you can't get support from PTC, that must mean that the maintenance isn't being paid. Also, if you have no plans to go any farther than WF5, just quit paying the maintenance - you bought the software, they can't take that away from you. All they can do is quit providing support and upgrades.
 
I think your IT dept is off by a factor of 10. Should be about $1500. PTC will be glad to get you a maintenance quote but they will pass you off to some worthless VAR because they can't be bothered with one seat.

With the cost of maintenance and the fact that PTC does not give new functionality to old licenses (they want you to pay upgrade fees for that then charge more maintenance on the upgrade), you can make a very good case to never pay maintenance and just buy new licenses every 4 or 5 years.
 
Thanks guys. That's EXACTLY what the IT dept doesn't want to do. their job. They just want to throw a cd in, push the button and walk away. As we all know, Pro/E is a different beast. But well WELL worth the effort. I have been on and off Pro since version 2.5 on a Sun Sparc 1 station. Yes Unix when that's all Pro would run on. I have taught as an adjunct prof at the local community college Adv solid modeling. As I work more and more with SW, it becomes more and more clear just how unpolished SW is and just how good Pro is. Typically the ones that complain from my experience are the ones that just do not understand or do not want to take the time to.

Anyway, thank you so much for your help.

Sid
 
Maintenance on our full blown seats (the old "Flex3C" package) is $4K per year. Our lesser seats are down closer to $2,500.

I think $15K will buy you 3 seats of Creo Foundation with a year of maintenance.

In our case, we've gone to paying our maintenance every 3rd year. Since PTC has stretched new releases to 18-24 months, there's little value for us in paying every year. Because of their policy to require 1 year of "back payment" to reinstate your maintenance (along with the year forward), you need to delay more than 12 months to start saving any money. By paying every 3rd year or so, we save 1/3 and still can keep up with our clients, who rarely upgrade until a new version is our for 6-12 months.

If we get in a bind and need to get back on early, we loose nothing. We end up paying what we would have anyway.
 
Just back on the topic... I recently changed job and I'm back using CAD and doing mechanical design after years of pure optical design (i.e. Zemax etc). I asked the company to get a quotation for Creo 3.0 but the results are quite... puzzling. I dont' want to know how much you payed for Creo but as I understand there are no more "foundation" "foundation XE" etc, just a basic license with extensions, am I right? I got a quotation of about 14'000$ for basic package + advanced assembly extension and a year of maintenance, but when I asked for a detailed quotation for each extension (so I can chose what I want to buy) I got all sort of numbers :/ Any idea on how much Creo extension packages should be charged?
 
That sounds about right in my experience.

I haven't looked at this in some time, but I don't think the basic lay of the land has changed much, even if the names have. The "foundation " package (once called foundation XE) is around $5K, the next step up adds PDM Link (was Foundation SE) for another $4-$5K and adding one extension (was Advanced XE) is another $4-$5K. So $14K for foundation + AAX is about right because you can't skip out on PDM Link, unfortunately. If you don't need PDM, press them for what your alternatives are, but if you want AAX (and you should), you may be stuck.

My info is about 3-4 years old, however, so keep that in mind. Press them to explain, and if they can't or won't, find another VAR to talk to. I've had good luck with TriStar.
 
Thank you Doug,

unfortunately I'm not the one talking to the VAR, we are part of a chinese company so I can speak only to my chinese colleagues :D Of course I want AAX (I don't think you can do top down design without it) but I also would like to know how much will it cost to add ISDX, Design exploration, behavioral modeling, tolerance analysis and Solidworks collaboration extension so I can chose what to keep and what to drop. Do you know if this is actually possible, I mean keeping or dropping only some extensions?
 
As I recall, it went from add one extension to get them all at the next jump and each jump was $4-$5K. Again, this was a few years ago and before some extensions like the SW collaboration.

My info on AAX says:

Advanced functionality for creating: assembly instruction sheets, top-down designs, global layouts, assembly family tables, and automated design changes (using Interchange assemblies, assembly programs and linked web pages).

You can do TDD with the old master model technique without AAX, but I don't think you can create skeletons, publish geoms or copy geoms.
 
Ok, I must admit I'm giving up on this, I'll let the chinese IT department buy whatever they want to buy because I simply can't understand the pricing they are giving us (and communicating with them is not at all straightforward). Doug just to understand a bit more, you said that 14K for base license + AAX is ok, and I agree, but then if the next step is the "get them all" (like Pokemon :D) license, will that cost about 5K more or 5K more for each module?

I was a bit spoiled because in the company where I worked before we had a very comprehensive license, so I got used to exploit tricks and features of ISDX and other modules even if we did not do advanced surfacing.
 
It's not $5K per module, but now that I think about it I think it's more than $5K total. I honestly don't remember, sorry.
 

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