topic Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo in General discussions

What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription model?

Paul King — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:01:53 GMT

I seem to recall the big carrot offered to induce us to switch away from dongles to the new and more expensive licensing regime, was that this way we would get regular new features coming through via incremental automatic service patches, without having to wait for a whole year for the full version update.

It seems that so far we have been getting no new features coming through during the year at all, and the first annual version update 28=>29 was so limited in architect-relevant new functionality that it resembled an incremental service patch far more than a version update.

Operating system used: Windows 11 H2 25

Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo

Mathias Jonathan — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:10:50 GMT

Since it's a now captive market with the subscription model, all I can say is a traduction of a french maxim: "Promises are only binding on those who believe them".

Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo

Jp1138 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:27:13 GMT

What was the last version to include significant modelling upgrades? Archicad 23 with beams and columns and the opening tool?

Later updates seem very minor for a company that must be earning a lot of money... Where is it being invested? AI stuff? What are GS programers doing all day at the office? - No ofense, it´s just that advances are so slow, you would think there are only three poor guys there putting out fires.

Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo

Claudiu Serban — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:40:10 GMT

It's definitely not a programming problem (tho it kinda is in the whole industry).

The problem stems from the Nemetchek behemoth trying to suck all the money possible from their customers.

Firstly, they went on aggressive acquiring of new companies and now they have like 3 Architectural solutions (Allplan, Vectorworks and Archicad), each with their own market/customer base.

Then they want to somehow upsell their other solutions to these customers. When it came to arhicad, they tried to facilitate a direct connection with Scia, which held archicad back for like 5 years, cause probably there are 2 people in the whole world who use AC structural analysis tools. Then they bought DDSCAD, and tried to upsell MEP/HVAC to engineers working with Archicad architects, using IFC interoperability and MEP Modeler. This failed as well, so now they gave Graphisoft DDS and they spewed the half baked MVP called MEP Designer.

Its all so easy, but they can't see that Revit is winning BECAUSE its ONE PRODUCT. The big firms dont want to spend time with hotlinking IFCs, updating interoperability addons, display issues, etc. They can have 1 license per seat, and that seat can switch between architect, structural or MEP/HVAC engineer. Not only that, but the addon market is much more appealing, and thats why Magicad is the golden standard when it comes to MEP/HVAC design/drafting.

So basically, they keep trying new stuff to grow their numbers, nothing works, they leave new features half baked to start even newer features that will be abandoned half baked in a couple years as well.

Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo

jl_lt — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:24:01 GMT

To the revit mep and structure "it's one product argument" I would add:

It's one product that has more than 20 years of a head start, with massive resources poured on it, marketing campaigns and user-base penetration that starts even before kids enter architectural school, and an extremely high cost of software switching which still would be high even if graphisoft had a competitive alternative.

One of my structural engineers became mildly interested in archicad when he saw me using it; I immediately fantasized of a nice little world in which I could interact with said engineer in the same software ecosystem.

So I asked in these very forum, eyes filled with hope, it they had promotional materials about archicad structural capabilities that I could show to said engineer and close the deal. The answer: no, we don't have any of that.

World shattered

Re: What happened to the promised 'regular new features' benefit of switching to new subscription mo

Wlad222 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:33:30 GMT

Unfortunately, Archicad is not improving at the pace many of us would like. While the software remains a strong BIM platform, progress in key areas such as performance, interoperability, visualization, automation, and modern workflows often feels too slow compared to the speed at which the industry is changing.