Upgrade planning
Payment schemes for DAWs and plugins have become increasingly complex, and rightly or wrongly there is clearly a trend towards subscriptions and ongoing payment plans. Bitwig operates a reasonably straightforward scheme whereby any new purchase includes all updates for 12 months from registration, and if you happen to time this well, this could even be a full version update. When the plan runs out you can keep using the software and you will get any further minor support updates released for that version.
At the end of the 12 months you can also purchase the Upgrade Plan. This will provide you with continued full updates for another 12 months at which point you can choose whether or not to renew it. The Upgrade Plan is completely optional and can be purchased at any time. It may seem like an unnecessary expense, however, Bitwig releases quite regular incremental updates, and with full version updates roughly every two years, it’s highly likely that you’ll get one full version update within that additional 12 month period.
One other advantage of maintaining your upgrade plan is that you have access to development beta versions ahead of release, and this has been the case for version 4.