First up, I haven’t raised a post to diss Harmony as a software package. It does an awful lot, and mostly it does it very well. It’s for this reason that I made the decision to invest in a perpetual license for Harmony back in 2020, along side a Silver Support package to protect my investment. Once the software is installed, I’ve found it pretty stable and besides, as a freelancer I’m installing the standalone version. I really don’t need a paid for support package (most software doesn’t - there’s an abundance of helpful people on the web happy to offer support and guidance for free), which means I’m paying £300GBP/year purely to ‘secure’ my investment in the software and remain eligible for upgrades to any new versions. I don’t feel I should have to pay for patches and bug fixes, nor should iterative releases be aligned to any support package. So, in effect, this year when Toon Boom hasn’t released a new version, I’ve paid for…well, what exactly? Because in the event that I were to let my support package lapse at all, the cost of upgrading to the next release would be almost as much as the initial £2,000 I paid for the license. When couched in those terms, for freelancers like me the support package amounts to something more like life insurance than a support offer. I haven’t raised a single ticket this year, there hasn’t been a new release of the software, so in effect I’m paying £300 just so I don’t get whacked hard in the wallet in order to keep the software current. Times are hard at the moment and I can think of 100 ways I could better use that money to support my business and my family, yet I can never get off the Toon Boom gravy train because the upgrade cost is so eye-wateringly high.
I really do think this is a pricing model that doesn’t serve freelancers or small outfits very well. It’s up to Toon Boom to decide whether that demographic deserves a more equitable package.
