My advice is: ditch them and use Rhino renderer or a stand-alone licence of a less aggressive enterprise making render engines. And for live rendering Rhino renderer and cycles does the job very well. I had bought a maxwell render licence many years ago like 600.- and although it is not live rendering, the quality is way better than KeyShot (at least if you render gems) Total I paid about 100.-/year over time and it will continue to work just fine. Once there are enough users doing so, they will probably change it back to a responsible price tag or system. give it out for nearly free and once we’re “dependent”, they’ll charge you like crazy! For me it’s important to set the sign that we are not ready to be milked. It’s a bit the silicon valley way of doing stuff. Personally I prefer not to work with software that milks me on a regular basis justifying it with “maintainance” which would be unnecessary, if they had not pushed out their buggy beta version. I think if it is in a ok balance (like Mudbox is about 10.- a month) this can be ok, but these prices seem waay exagerated. I had some experiences lately with these new kind of licenced softwares where you pay money and still they don’t stop harassing you with: c’mon, buy more or we’ll restrict everything to a nearly unusable in our next update, even stuff you’ve already paid for.
