Alibre Sets Deadline for the $99 Offer

If you’re still deliberating whether or not you should snatch up Alibre Design Standard for $99, you should know the countdown has begun.

Max Freeman, Alibre’s VP or marketing, notified me in an email: The offer ends September 29, 2009.

Alibre began offering its basic MCAD program, Alibre Design Standard, for $99 in the first week of August. The company is also getting ready to deliver the next release, Alibre V12, sometime in September. So the “ridiculously low price” (Alibre’s words, not mine) for the current version, V11, seems to be drawing to an end.

But in the final four weeks of the sale, Alibre plans to lure more CAD buyers to its site with special deals on a few optional add-ons:

• Training Bundle (currently $99, regularly $399)
• Alibre Translate (currently $99, regularly $499)

Though less publicized and less dramatic in discount, Alibre is also running special offers on Alibre Design Professional (now $944, regularly sold $1,848) and Alibre Design Expert (now $1,494, regularly sold for $2,398). Note that these prices include support and product updates for a year.

What Exactly Do You Get for $99? I tried answering this question by downloading and running the 30-day trial from Alibre. But figuring out the content of Alibre Design Standard, I discovered, takes some deductive reasoning. (Will Sherlock Holmes please step forward?)

What you get to try out is not Alibre Design Standard but Alibre Design Professional, with some add-on modules turned on. To figure out what you’ll be left with if you choose Alibre Design Standard, you need to identify which features will go away after 30 days (because they require either a license of Alibre Design Professional or an add-on, which costs extra). Working backward in this fashion, I arrive at the basic chart shown above.

The grumbles it overheard about the confusion caused by its downloadable trial’s setup prompted Alibre to take swift action. The company recently added to its site a page detailing what you get and (perhaps more importantly) what you don’t in each edition of Alibre. This page greets you once you’ve completed the personal info form for the special offer:

For more on this topic, read the following posts and watch the video below:

• Alibre Slashes Price by 90%, August 10, 2009
• Another Look at Alibre’s Land Grab, August 27, 2009