Autodesk, the makers of popular game development software such as 3ds Max and Maya, have just announced a new PAYG or Pay As You Go pricing scheme called Autodesk Flex. Under Autodesk Flex an organization can buy tokens, which can then be shared by users within the organization. Each time a user opens an appropriate application, for example Maya, that user pays a fee ( 6 tokens in the case of Maya ) and gets access to that application for 24 hours. A token is between $2.80 and $3.00 depending on bulk buying, so a day of Max or Maya will cost roughly $18 and tokens can be shared within an organization.
This makes Autodesk Flex pricing ideal for occasional users of Autodesk products, although according to the Estimator Tool, if you use an application for more then 6 days a month, the subscription pricing is the better option. Unfortunately due to the minimum purchase of 500 tokens for $1,500, this makes Flex a much less useful tool for small studios that only occasionally need access to Autodesk tools. However to an organization with a larger number of employees that only require occasional access, it could be a great opportunity.
Autodesk Flex pricing is available for a wide variety of products in addition to 3ds Max and Maya, such as MudBox, Motion Builder and Flame. You can check out the daily token cost of these applications in their PDF rate sheet available here. It is also important to note that tokens expire annually and are not automatically rolled over to the next year. Autodest Flex pricing will be available starting September 23rd, 2021.
You can learn more about Autodesk Flex pricing in the video below. Thanks to 80.lvl for the original article.