Allegorithmic goes ‘Rent-to-Own’ with Substance Live

Today, Allegorithmic solves the subscription or buy debate by offering a better way: rent-to-own. With Substance Live, users can now get the complete Substance toolset for $19.90.USD/month with no feature limitation. Each payment goes towards a full license and the plan can be paused at any time, providing maximum flexibility for professional texture artists.

The latest versions of Substance Designer 5, Substance Painter 1.3 and Bitmap2Materials 3 can be purchased individually or as part of a full set. Substance Live will also give users access to special offers, exclusive services and beta builds, even after they’ve paid off their license.

As the months go on, payment status as well as new product updates will be available on the Substance Live dashboard, accessible anywhere there’s a browser. Bigger payments can be made at any time, so artists always have the freedom to treat their account as they wish.

Providing Some Breathing Room

“Options provide breathing room,” said Dr. Sébastien Deguy, founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. “With Substance Live, we wanted to rethink how people pay for software. If it’s only for a project, what if they only needed to pay for that time? If they want to own it, why can’t that process be more affordable? Substance Live answers these questions.”

01 – Allegorithmic’s new Substance Designer 5 is professional texture compositing tool for Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

At GDC, Allegorithmic will be in Booth #212 showcasing demos of new Substance products and hosting 3 days of presentations from artists at Dreamworks Animation, Ubisoft Montreal, Relic Entertainment, Rust Ltd., and others. For their full GDC schedule, click here.

To schedule a meeting with Allegorithmic or to view a demonstration during GDC 2015, please contact: Alexis Khouri, alexis.khouri@allegorithmic.com.

Pricing and Availability

Substance Live is available from the following URL: www.allegorithmic.com, Steam or the Unity asset store. The Indie license is $19.90.USD/month for 16 months, while the pro version is $64.90.USD/month. Indies can also pay an upfront cost of $299.USD for the complete Substance toolset.

Architosh Analysis

New technologies are allowing a more nimble and flexible approach for ISVs (independent software vendors) to both reach audiences and to collect fees for the use of their software. This new “rent-to-own” model should be applauded precisely for the reasons mentioned above. With speciality toolsets like this one, tools that fit into and compliment more established workflows and multi-software pipelines, this kind of model, along with subscription, does indeed give users breathing room.

The classic case is the entity that isn’t sure they will ramp up (in work) that justifies the benefits of software ownership (upfront) yet isn’t crazy about subscribing either. The risk of subscribing comes the possibility that that work may come through after all and it would have been financially beneficial to own not subscribe the software. Allegorithmic is addressing this precise type of issue for the end user.