Those who buy the new program know that there are no free upgrades after the first year.
I personally won't upgrade for the reasons you state as well as the fact that selling a product with a "lifetime upgrade guarantee" only to delete this policy in favor of upgrade charges is dishonest.
For Topaz to change their policy and now charge an upgrade is a slight to all who supported them in the past. And like you stated I also bought Topaz programs because they advertised free lifetime upgrades. I've found that in some cases Nik's Dfine works better. I've wondered about DXO's Deep Prime as I've had mixed results with Denoise AI after running it through the ringer. I often skip upgrades for other products, doing every-other one, and I might wind up doing this with Topaz, but I was going to do the first upgrade (since they abandoned free upgrades), but I'm now rethinking this.Ĭlick to expand.I'm glad you posted this, Richard. I like to support Topaz, but I think their new upgrade pricing structure is out of whack. $30 or $35 each seems like the sweet spot to me. With the AI products, if you were to buy a complete set of them every year, it could be major bucks with this price structure, I think. It's not like their Studio2, where you get a lot of editing capabilities and a complete editing product. Most of these AI products are one-trick ponies - they do one thing very well. I would spring for $35, maybe even every year, but $50 is a lot to pay for what looks like a pretty minor upgrade, no matter how good the software, IMHO. I think an upgrade like this should be at most 50% of the cost of the product (so $40) and even less (say $35). The software costs $80 for a new customer (one year). I think that this is too much for them to be asking for an upgrade. However, I recently got an offer from Topaz to upgrade my expired SharpenAI license (earlier versions still work) for $49 for one year. I really like Topaz software and their AI products (SharpenAI, DenoiseAI, etc) do contain some abilities that are beyond other products, IMHO.