Our choice of pricing Bitspeek RE at $49 (compared to $29 for the AU/VST) has been brought up on the Propellerhead's board many times over the past few days. People are using it as an argument that RE prices are too high and even higher than VSTs, which in general is not true. I am sorry if we have given fuel to this fire and I want to explain why we chose a higher price.

Most importantly, Bitspeek RE is more advanced than Bitspeek AU/VST, both in feature set and sound quality. Secondly, the $29 price you see on our site for the AU/VST is actually excluding VAT. The RE store uses a price "tier" system a la App Store. We can't set USD and EUR prices separately and the EUR price includes VAT, so depending on where you live the actual price difference ranges between $12 and $20. The price of Bitspeek AU/VST will be adjusted upwards to reflect this price change when it is updated. (Sorry, but we do not have a time frame for this update yet.)

This is how we run things at Sonic Charge. If you were to look at our price history you would find that MicroTonic has gone from $69 to $89 to $99, although the upgrades have always been free to existing customers. Call us crazy but we like to reward early adopters.

In hindsight we should have communicated all of above before the RE store was launched, and the smart businessman-like move might have been to have an introduction offer at $29. But I am not a fan of indiscriminating discounts. I am a fan of selective discounts, but unfortunately the RE store does not (yet) offer any such possibilities. We would have been happy to offer our existing customers a crossgrade discount otherwise. Hopefully this should be possible in the future.

My general opinion concerning RE prices (which I reserve the right to change) is that if a product of ours compares 1 to 1 in features, it will be in the same ballpark price-wise across the range of supported formats. However, it is still too early to tell wether we will actually make products that compare 1 to 1 in feature set. RE is a dream come true in many aspects. It is an astonishingly well-defined and strict standard, but that comes with the price of limitations. In the future, I will enjoy exploring how to put both formats to best use.

Magnus,
I think your plugins are very original compared with others.
They are very stable, resource savers, with no bugs. This means a good and long time programming work.
I think that good works must be payed.
Your plugins have an honest price and offers more than they costs.
There is a lot of plugins less creative (and with a minor quality) than yours that costs more.
Don't justify yourself, you're in right.

What can Bitspeek RE do that the VST cant?

- Kristoffer Ekstrand wrote:
What can Bitspeek RE do that the VST cant?

You can find a short list in this post: http://soniccharge.com/forum/index.php?/topic/305-bitspeek-now-available-for-reason/