The price of PVS-Studio license renewal is 80% of the initial price at the moment of renewal (of the current price for the same license). The license is renewed for one year as well.
A year after purchasing the license you will receive a letter from us with the request to renew the license. If this letter doesn't reach you or is lost for some reason, please write to us and we will resend it.
Why do I have to renew the license every year?
Static code analysis tools refer to the software type for which quality and continuous customer support is very important. Yes, there are several tools which are distributed for free, but they will hardly ever reach the market leaders.
Generally speaking, a static analysis tool can become free and open-source if the developer company gets purchased by some giant like Google, Microsoft or Intel, but this is a special case.
Static analysis tools are usually sold according to the scheme of annually renewable license. Some users might not like it but we will try to explain why this scheme is the best for this segment.
As it has been already said, support is very important for static analysis tools. In the field of static analysis, customer support implies, first of all, cases when the analyzer cannot parse some user code (it contains complicated C++ templates, non-standard compiler extensions, etc.) and we must promptly (during several days) improve the analyzer so that it can parse our customer's code. Our aid in integrating the tool into the customer's development process is also very important as well as implementation of users' requests to make it more convenient to handle the tool.
All this costs money. That's why we cannot sell the license once and support the customers for free for the rest of our life.
One could sell new major-releases, for instance, versions v3, v4, v5... What is bad about this scheme is that it makes the developer "hold" new cool capabilities of the tool till the next major-version instead of releasing them right away as soon as they're ready.
Thus, it turns out that annual license renewal is the best way. Meanwhile, some developer companies set the price at 100% of the initial price, while others set a lower price (making a discount for renewal). In the latter case, it can be explained this way: the first year's price includes additional costs on teaching the customer to work with the tool.
Besides, our static analyzer is going on to develop, as we actively add new diagnostic rules. So, the set of rules available now is quite different from what we had a year ago. New diagnostic rules are very useful because they are not just another meaningless decoration of the program kind of "let's just make a new version".
