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08/11/2019 5:21 pm
What's the difference between Photopia and Photodex, and why a subscription model? You can purchase ProShow Producer for a one-time cost of $249, whereas you are asking $249.95 per year for Director- if you pay all of that up front!
Upgrades of ProShow Producer are less than $100 - if you choose to upgrade. Even purchasing a month's subscription from you when I need it would still be expensive if I used it enough.
It sounds to me like you just changed your name in order to create a subscription version of Photodex's software. I wonder what the other ProShow customers think about this. I, for one, am not pleased.
You had the best software for it's purpose and the best software support of any application out there. Now you are putting the screws to your old customers!
09/11/2019 4:56 am
Photopia is a new company that was started by some of the same people who helped design / create the award winning ProShow line of products. While the Creator / Director applications are similar to Gold / Producer, they are distinctly different products. Having some of the same hands on board for both product lines means that there will certainly be some strong similarities, but the newer programs were designed to be 64-bit from the ground up and are based on an entirely new set of code. Having said that, a strong effort has been made to maintain compatibility with older ProShow content (ex. slideshows, slide styles, transitions, etc.), which accentuates those similarities.
A subscription based product model certainly has its pros and cons, as does the lifetime-purchase model. I could talk for a long time about these differences but, as I understand it, the basic decision here came down to how we want Photopia slideshow products to evolve over time.
With a traditional lifetime-purchase software model the feature set for each version of the product becomes static. Older versions of the product require ongoing support without benefiting from the latest features or (in some cases) bug fixes. Companies are also forced to make a decision on how to provide support for those older products; version restricted assistance, expensive support contracts, or simply absorbing the cost.
Using a subscription based model allows us to prioritize product improvements while providing customers with the latest features (and fixes) at all times. It's a product-focused approach which avoids some of the legacy support issues that tend to stymie progress. We understand what this can do to the overall cost of ownership, which is why we've made sure to include some of the better slideshow features at both product levels (ex. keyframes can be found in Director AND Creator). If you're focused on making slideshows, rather than slide styles / transitions, you may find that Creator (at $9.95 / month or $99.95 / year) is more than sufficient for all of your slideshow creation needs.
If you haven't already, we encourage you to download Creator (or Director) and give it a try.