Rees Maxwell

N. van der Walle... you’re really blowing it here. The way you condescend makes me embarrassed to say I like the products you are pushing. Seriously, is there anyone else from Astute who can come in here and at least talk from a place of respect? The way you talk as if everything Astute does is all for the benefit of everyone else is BS. And again, I gladly paid a ton of money for your products out of my own pocket to save my non-profit some money, and then when Astute refused to just upgrade them to make them 64-bit or whatever the macOS / Adobe tech change was that would have required a total rewrite... your company opted to use that as an opportunity to make a new cash grab by making all your customers either stop using your plugins that they’d bought (because they stopped working with the new version of Adobe), or force them to pay for them all again unto eternity with your rental model. And to make matters worse, Astute dragged their feet on it, causing your customers who upgraded their Adobe suite to have to work without any functional plugins from Astute for a very long time, and all the queries from me and others in your forums would not be answered with anything other than new versions were coming out. No date, no timeline, and certainly no advance warning that you all were going to make us keep paying to rent the plugins we’d already purchased, in perpetuity. it is disingenuous to tout Astute as an angelic corporation as you insinuate here. And it’s heinous the way you tell people with valid viewpoints that they are being emotional. Do you treat your family the same way, just touting your ideas and beliefs as reality and 100% accurate and putting down other people’s as simply “an emotional opinion”? Must be frustrating to be around you if this is your usual way of being. I hope for your family’s sake that you actually listen to and value their opinions and don’t treat any opinion contrary to yours as “emotional.” Your words here in this forum have greatly devalued Astute for me. I have a real nasty taste in my mouth after watching you repeatedly belittle others here. I am no longer too keen on your company and certainly don’t wish to contribute to the financial success of your company if you are at all the product of their culture. If I don’t hear from someone higher up than you on this forum, I will be looking into phasing out my use of your plugins, and seeking other means to adjust my workflow. Maybe your condescending attitude here is a blessing in disguise as it may be the thing which finally causes me to totally rework my workflow so I can get rid of Astute and Adobe for good and instead work entirely with a company who values their customers and listens to their customers. And I’m guessing I’m not the only one who now feels this way.

I DO mind paying Adobe, though it's not me but my non-profit which pays. However, I'd like my nonprofit to be paying less, and so I am transitioning my workflow to Affinity products. I paid for Affinity personally. I also paid for the Astute plug-ins personally even though they were for work, 'cause I try to benefit my non-profit and I knew I could use them for private work as well...and then once I'd finally purchased all the Astute plugins I wanted, they switched to a subscription model! Are their plugins worth $119/year? Well, I'd paid about $350 to buy them before they scrapped them for the sub model, so I suppose they're worth it for three years just on price. But for value...what I get out of them, it's immense. They not only save me time in some of my design work, they give me options that give me new ideas for projects. If there is an alternative to Adobe Suite, I'll take it! Affinity fills closer and closer to 100% of my needs there...and it's not subscription based. Once they finally decide they need more of my money and can justify it though a new version release I'll pay the "one-time" fee again. Meanwhile, there aren't any alternatives to Astute's suite of plugins. So I have no option other than to just stop using them...and that would add more design time to my projects. If someone else comes along and makes a replacement for Astute and charges a ton but it's a one-time fee...I might be persuaded to drop the sub and buy them. But to give them all up for good? It's a no go. That's how I see it, for me and my workflow.

Yeah, I was dismayed to say the least when I contacted Astute about their plugins not working when I upgraded my macOS (already running with subscription Adobe) and they dragged their feet a long time before saying that I could either downgrade my Mac, or toss out all my Astute plugins and rent them from now on. To be clear, what their plugins allow me to do in Illustrator is magnificent. I really wish they worked in Affinity products. They kickass. But I'm still bitter about their change in business model.

I absolutely love the Astute plugins, and paid many hundreds of dollars over time purchasing almost all of them. Then once a more recent MacOS came out (can't remember which one) they said they were no longer developing their stand-alone plugins and I had to now rebuy as none of mine would work any longer, and now I could only rent them as they only run on a subscription model. I get that as a developer having people only pay once forever doesn't help the long term needs of development. This is why I guess after a time some devs put out new versions of products, so they can get paid again for new features, but it gives the users of older versions the ability to keep using the older one if that's working for them. Instead, Astute wanted people to buy their plug-ins, and then moved to subscription model and none of my plug-ins would work any longer. Period. (Due to them choosing to go this route instead of making new versions which worked with the new macOS and just charging an upgrade fee or whatever.) Sucks that I have to rent software now, but that's life if you want the power of the plugins that Astute provides. And remember, I paid a lot of money for their plug-ins previously. I actually can't believe the Affinity products are so inexpensive, and wonder how they have the money to continue development, but maybe they are chasing institutions and getting more money that way. (Would be a ton cheaper for high-schools and colleges to buy site licenses from Serif than Adobe.) I'd pay even more for the Affinity suite if it cost more because I'd own it. I just don't like renting software.

Please put me on your contact list for when you publish the Publisher Workbook! I'm eagerly awaiting this!