[Righty27]

Notwithstanding the usual discussions about Waves and their older plugins that have been surpassed by newer tech, the usual discussion is about WUP.

I'd heard about the negativity before buying my first Waves plugin yet, whilst 'real' Waves plugin prices have fallen substantially over several years (I have also picked up quite a few since prices started to drop), the WUP cost has not.

Combined with the inevitable need to upgrade eventually (e.g. new operating system, PC/Mac, etc.) and Waves recently moving to V10 with no obvious changes/improvements (V9 still works fine BTW), it's reasonable to assume that future OS compatibility updates will only be made available on V10 ... and there's nothing to stop these updates arriving more regularly in future now that Waves appears to have settled on a low selling price model.

All of this leads to basically treating your Waves plugins as a kind of stealth subscription, with a fixed-cost upgrade option that increases in value with the more plugins purchased e.g. at $29 (due to fixed WUP cost).

At present, WUP pricing might seem to work for users who originally paid high bundle prices and perceive a higher investment in Waves. However, for those of us with maybe 10 plugins who find that the cost to update is equivalent to buying them again at sale prices, the 'sale' novelty soon wears off :)

As we enter Black Friday crazy Plugin week, another company whose business model appears to rely on upgrade fees is Izotope (albeit less about 'cheap' plugins and undoubtedly modern tech), with regular upgrades to core products like Ozone also making this feel like a subscription ... and this years $99 sale price for Ozone 8 (probably signalling Ozone 9 coming soon!) is great for new users but substantially less than the $149 upgrade cost for existing users, who can obviously just buy a new copy and essentially write-off the cost of their old version as a usage subscription also.