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$10k is kind of a crime for individuals. For businesses, absolutely, high prices for critical tools with support contracts is a no brainer. I just about coughed up a lung when I heard how much my company pays for 2 floating licenses of specialized engineering software (six figures per year). But in terms of ROI, it's easy to justify.

Your robot could easily sell at 20-30k. If you add some kind of calibration/support service to guarantee whatever operating parameters, you could charge a subscription on top of that. Test equipment is normally fairly expensive and specialized, and no one who runs tests in a commercial environment wants to be in a situation where they are their own checks/balances. So even though they could easily build/maintain test equipment themselves, companies will avoid it if possible. It's why businesses will buy the $5k name brand multimeters, test probes, etc instead of the $200 no name one with the same specs.



I used to work at a small company where the most expensive licence was $10k. One of our big customers basically asked us to make a more expensive licence so they could give us more money to try and make sure we didn't go away.


Right but small company making two-sided boards with a few dozen chips don't need the 80% of extra features it comes with.

With that kind of licensing it just makes possible future users go to competition.




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