Sketch: License Is Changing | Hacker News Reader

Sketch: License Is Changing

sketch.com

9 pointsbredren5 comments

Sketch has always sort of been an implicit subscription: you pay the current retail price, you get upgrades for a year, then if you want to upgrade past that, you pay the current retail price again next year. As far as I can tell, you can still use your old version of Sketch without switching to this explicit subscription model. So, that part doesn't feel like a huge change to me.

I assume the SaaS version phones home to check your license all the time, and probably it won't let you use the application if you aren't connected (this is speculation on my part). But (also speculation) I assume it's already been phoning home telemetry data for years, and most professional designers are online anyway. So, practically speaking, not a huge change for most users.

But, this does feel like a notable change, and not for the good. Other than its drastically improved UI and laser-targeted feature set, the thing that distinguished Sketch from Adobe CC when it came out was that it wasn't a SaaS product. Now it is.

It feels a little desperate. They've lost a lot of market share to Figma, and this feels like a pivot from financial necessity, not something they are doing to improve the product, which is where you'd hope the impetus would come from.

Is it really a pivot or just offering a new product in addition to the existing one?

Now you can have an offline tool you pay for once or pay monthly to get all the bells and whistles figma has.

To me it feels like a win-win - I don't personally want a sub but my company will. They moved from Sketch to figma for those features and dont mind monthly fees. Personally, I dont use it often enough to justify a monthly fee so im glad the copy i bought a few years ago still works just fine.

Horrible, forcing you into a subscription. The Mac Only license is not even cheaper (its same price) while you get less functionality. It's silly.

I disagree.

If you use a tool like Figma and you DON'T want the cloud features you have to pay a sub for ever.

If you have 100s of sketch files they work forever without needing to pay any continued fees.

I have sketch files from 5+ years ago i can still open with my copy of Sketch but with Figma, having over 2(?) files in a "project" requires a subscription.

I like that they give you options and you can find the one that works for you. Running collaborative cloud features isnt free for them, so i understand paying for it.

I DO NOT understand paying a monthly fee for a tool that never uses "the cloud" and i wish more tools had this kind of model.

Yes, but wouldn't expect it to be a bit cheaper than the subscription version? Also you can't open files from the cloud in the Mac only version.

It's unclear to me how the Cloud licensing works; can you keep using Sketch when you stop paying or?

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