BIM 360 Pricing

[Kev_D]

Audodesk, here is a great idea!

I just can't seem to justify the cost for all these extra platforms to the final decision makers here in our office. Why are prices so high? I understand, to a degree, the cost per user for BIM 360 Design (which comes with Doc Mgmt) as it has the capabilities of collaborating across offices/cities/countries with Revit. However, having to pay another subscription for Doc Mgmt alone in order to share project info to the remainder of the team who don't use Revit is beyond justifiable. If a firm was to get a subscription for 25 users on Doc Mgmt, this would only cover one project and cost nearly $6,000 CAD. What about having multiple projects with different users?? Paying over $15,000 CAD for 100 users is crazy when you consider all the other licenses/subscriptions that a firm has to pay, including; BIM 360 Design and Revit itself. It may be easier for a larger firm to fork out this much, but even at that, i'm sure it is difficult for many of them to still justify it as they would probably require the 1000 user package at a cost of nearly $80,000 CAD!

Doc Mgmt is like an FTP site in a way, and it would be great to get rid of our current FTP and streamline the use of BIM 360 across the board by migrating all our projects to BIM 360 Doc Mgmt, but we currently have fantastic payment deals with our FTP provider so it is difficult to steer away from this considering the high costs of Doc Mgmt. There is not even the option to have a free viewer access in order to share a doc with anyone who has the link which they can view and even download. Why not give such a basic feature? All countries and organizations are pushing for the use of BIM, but how can we move forward considering BIM has developed into big business which is slowing down the uptake of BIM.

I know some will try to justify these costs who have links with Autodesk, but the numbers just don't add up.

An analogy I always use is for situations like this is:

Two bars side by side with one charging $10 for a beer and the other charging $5 for a beer. The bar with the $5 beers would be full (albeit a different type of crowd), but they would be making considerably more money that the other bar who only has a few customers. 

I personally have many colleagues in the industry who would love to completely implement BIM 360 but currently do not due to the costs associated with it. Why not create better/cheaper subscriptions? Why not introduce a free viewer? COME ON AUTODESK, HELP THE INDUSTRY MOVE TOWARD BIM!!!

[brightguy]

Yes, agreed.  Autodesk really doesn't understand the AEC industry and their customers or frankly just doesn't care because they want to maximize profits and feel that they have a monopoly that allows them to charge like this.  It's frustrating for smaller firms that have to pay exorbitant annual fees as well as invest in machines that can support multiple versions of Revit because so many firms can't afford to stay current on the latest platform.   They really have a "one size fits all" mentality and for huge firms that can afford their fees and all the add-on costs, it may be no big deal.  However, for small businesses to thrive and compete, Autodesk makes it near impossible.  It's like they are colluding to push small business enterprises out of the water.  It's frustrating that they don't seem to listen to the needs or concerns of their customers.

[JensDeSmedt]

It's true, Autodesk doesn't understand the Local/Country AEC industry. Here in Belgium, architects and engineers should be able to use all platforms (Design, Glue, Build) to do their coordination job, but who will pay it...? If you compaire functions and pricing of BIM360Design with Bimcloud of Graphisoft then they schould reduce theire prices with 90%. There are beter and cheaper solutios when you want to start  with BIM into the cloud.

At the end it’s always the client who pay’s and on 9/10, they don’t care how their content will be stored. It’s not easy to convince them when there are other big companies who give their data storage “for free”. Autodesk should rethink (again) their BIM360 business model.

They shouldn’t ask so much if the products works well,… ore they don’t believe jet in their own cloud products