To WUP or Not to WUP...that is the question...

[DonaldM]

As I expected, a broad range of opinions on this subject! I have to time to decide, so I'll read up more on their current offerings and see what direction I might want to go.

[Righty27]

I rarely use most of my Waves but have a few I like that newer/better plugins/developers don't cover, such as Vocal Rider. Having mostly V9 and not WUP'd previously, I took advantage of the 25% offer, with a bit extra from Audiodeluxe, mainly for Mac M1 compatibility, which they will hopefully address fully for Pro Tools over the next 12 months (almost everything else except FCPX already addressed).

Coincidentally, having visited the Waves website, I received a 'long time no see' voucher from them (which I didn't add to Audiodeluxe) and then received another voucher for having WUP'd ... so ended up using these to get Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain + Vocal Bender (on the basis of weird stuff others don't cover, so worth a play!)

Conclusion - Waves business model builds on their uniquely-long history in the industry ... and they know that they're doing to generate new revenues even with their old back-catalogue by selling customers new stuff without moving to recurring subscriptions (similar to Plugin Alliance IMO) :)

[simon.a.billington]

WUP makes sense when you realise that Waves don't usually release major versions of their plugins. Nothing breaks backwards compatibility like adding new features to a plugin so Waves don't do it.

Since they're not selling "new features" unless its in the form of a new plugin, then they can't make any money for maintenance costs. This is why maintenance is charged separately as WUP. Which is around $10-30 per plugin with it capping at around $240, I think.

It's a little annoying to pay as you often don't get any of those shiny new features with it, but if you add that $30 overhead to the cost of a new plugin, which you can pick up on sale for around $30-50 then the price becomes quite competitive with any other developer who often charge $100+ for the same kind of thing.

The other plus side is you can generally hold off un WUP until you need it. That could be years... unless you've Apple has been messing things up for you recently.

[JFreak]

Times when you need WUP it is useless. Try to get Waves send you old V7 iLok auths for an older system, nada. They assume you are running latest and greatest, and if you aren't you are out of support no matter how often you WUP.