Thanks to a wall-garden and paywalls, Pix4D forces users to have a $199/month subscription to fully utilize the Catch app. This is one of the reasons why I have blacklisted Pix4D in our company. Why is it not an option to have a much less expensive license to utilize the app? I prefer to process my data locally with other software so all I need is the capture and the ability to download the images. Something in the realm of $20/month would be fair and they could even add $5/month to add the RTK functionality. You would think $300/year from what would be undoubtedly be a much larger user base would be appealing to them. This even provides the ability to gain more full subscription customers once they see what the app is capable of. We would infrequently use the ground capture so over $2k/year is out of the question.
I understand your frustration, especially if you’re only an occasional user of the app. The current pricing is meant for people using the app daily for professional usage. We need to better address the occasional usage groups, maybe with a “pay-per-use” model that would be more advantageous than the full subscription if used only a few times during the year?
Maybe you can share a bit more context, e.g. what kind of work you would use the app for, how frequently it would be used, etc…this would help to better understand the situation and find an appropriate response.
Thanks!
Usage based pricing would be outstanding. I lead a reality capture department for a national GC so our usual tool compliment is a mix of geomatics, terrestrial lasers and drones. High-end usage with tight Survey-grade tolerances in a commercial environment. Mobile capture has it’s place but is not a primary source of capture. If we are scanning an as-built for an underground utility, we only scan according to the pace of the work being performed and once that scope is complete there is little use for it until the next scope starts or we have another task that would benefit from it. I don’t know what customers you have that use it extensively enough to justify the cost, but it is obvious across the internet that $200/month is too much for what most people are doing.
As another use case I operate my own geomatics services company on the side and I have come across some projects that this would be great for. This gets into the use case that I don’t need Pix4D Cloud processing. I am either downloading the images and processing to our tolerances, or I only need RTK-tagged images for other purposes. I hope this helps clear up the possible scope of what Pix4DCatch could be.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, this makes more sense now. I will look into the “pay-per-use” pricing model, as this could fill a gap in our current offering. You seem to be doing quite a broad range of work, I’m interested to know more. Do you mind if I reach out to you by email to discuss this on a call?
I am not sure I got this one 100%, especially this part: “This gets into the use case that I don’t need Pix4D Cloud processing. I am either downloading the images and processing to our tolerances, or I only need RTK-tagged images for other purposes.”
It’s not clear to me whether you simply want to export the data from PIX4Dcatch to process in a desktop photogrammetry software such as PIX4Dmatic, or whether you simply want RTK geolocated images for another purpose (I’m curious what that would be). In both cases, this is something that is supported today, more here: How to export PIX4Dcatch projects
Maybe I misunderstood something, in that case, please tell me more about what you’re looking to achieve with example use cases and I’ll get back to you with a more appropriate response.