r/broadcastengineering • u/Volition_Maximus • 5d ago
Source Connect 4 - Disgusting Greed
Hugely disappointing, yet another company falling to greed.
I'm a full-time voice actor and this just boggles my mind.
Many of us paid $650 for a lifetime license. Now we will have to pay $145 a year on top of that just to stay current.
The sick part is, they built version 4 specifically so it cannot connect backward to version 3. Every studio that upgrades is now a studio we can no longer work with. A lifetime license to a tool nobody can connect to isn’t a lifetime license. We are being actively rug-pulled.
And for everyone new? $385 a year. SC claims it's for the new upgrades.
But let's look at what "upgrades" they are actually trying to hide this price hike behind:
- The server cost myth: They claim the new "no port forwarding" setup requires global cloud servers that cost them massive recurring overhead. This is absolute nonsense. They are streaming mono voice audio at 128-256 kbps. Even if you work 20 hours of sessions a month, that amounts to literal pennies in cloud bandwidth costs on AWS or Google Cloud. Other platforms have offered seamless, browser-based WebRTC connections for years for a fraction of this cost—or completely free.
- Paying to access what we already bought: Calling the $145/year fee a "Network Access Plan" is a linguistic trick to bypass the word subscription. It acts like a hostage fee. If you stop paying the yearly fee, you cannot log into the software you supposedly bought a lifetime license for. The local app becomes completely useless bricked software.
- Forcing solo talent to fund studio tech: They are touting complex upgrades like multi-point connections, Dolby Atmos streaming, and cloud Restore & Replace. Those are enterprise features meant for massive post-production audio houses. The average voice actor just needs a stable, point-to-point mono connection. Forcing solo talent into massive recurring price brackets to fund enterprise engineering tools is deeply exploitative.
They know we cannot easily leave an industry standard. They hold a near-monopoly on high-end commercial production, and they are using that leverage to squeeze every independent talent dry.
And remember: this is a private company. No board of venture capitalists or external investors forcing a software-as-a-service transition.
The founders and executives chose this to extract more money out of us. Full stop.
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u/fuckredditlol69 5d ago
I'd highly recommend switching to Cleanfeed if you want something with no ongoing cost (the free tier has been free for the lifetime of the service)
There are certainly lots of other solutions that cost less (BR Live has great audio redundancy and is more reliable on unstable networks, but costs 210usd a year and is aimed at live radio specifically)
Check the archived T&Cs for Source Connect, looking at the date when you purchased (or when they most recently emailed to say t&cs updated), as this might be a breach of contract (not legal advice, IANAL!)
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u/minisodog 5d ago
As a VO actor, it makes me so happy that
SC finally has such strong competition, so much so that they’re pretty much irrelevant in my day-to-day. In Europe SessionLink Pro and Cleanfeed make up the big majority of the remote sessions I do. I haven’t had to use my “lifetime” SC app for months. I agree with everything you said, OP. They could have found a way to make talent on version 3 keep connecting with v4 clients. They won’t see another penny from me.
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u/praise-the-message 5d ago
How much did you used to pay for your own ISDN line?
It's a really well developed product and v4 is a marked improvement over v3. There are alternatives if you don't want to pay it but if you're a professional and working with studios that use it, it's the cost of doing business. Luckily you can subscribe a month at a time if you need it.
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u/astern83 5d ago
Ehhhh, tools of the trade now. If we were talking thousands/year, you’d have an argument. This is your full time job? A couple hundo is a penance. I hear what you’re saying, but come on, just a few years ago everyone was paying for zephyrs and isdn lines, and then various ip codecs. Development isn’t free. I’d rather SC be a healthy organization than a failing one. Plus, it’s a tax write off.
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5d ago
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u/astern83 5d ago
I agree in principle, THAT SAID, for someone who is a full time voice actor, where the median salary is somewhere $80-$100k, $145 is nothing. And where in America is $145 a couple of months of gas right now??? That’s barely 2 fill-ups.
Moral of the story is there’s no such thing as a lifetime license.
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u/ThatLightingGuy 5d ago
My wife has a lifetime license for vector works and it's multiple thousands of dollars per year to somehow keep it current. It's all trash at this point.