Nuke family of vfx products moves to annual subscription

Foundry has announced that all new licenses of Nuke family products are moving over to subscription-only plans with immediate effect for new users.

Nuke developer Foundry has announced that all new licenses of Nuke family products (including Nuke, NukeX, Nuke Studio, Hiero, HieroPlayer and Nuke Render) are now available on annual or quarterly subscription only.

It is doubling down on the pay as you go subscription model by canning all perpetual licenses with immediate effect. New perpetual licenses for these products will only continue to be available to existing Nuke customers up to the end of this year. After that they will cease to be sold entirely.

Quarterly rentals will continue to be available for those that find the annual one a step too far, though on the whole they will give users only around six months use for the price of the full year.

Foundry customers who have purchased perpetual Nuke family licenses prior to December 31, 2023 can, of course, continue to use and maintain those licenses, while customers on active maintenance will continue to receive product updates and technical support.

What does all that mean for pricing? Nuke is now £2499 a year, NukeX is £3699, Nuke Studio is £4599, and Nuke Render £329, with the now rare and limited new perpetual licenses approximately double that. Each new subscription purchase of NukeX and Nuke Studio will also include two free Nuke Render subscriptions though to help new customers with provisioning render farms, and existing customers looking to expand render farms as workload increases.

Quarterly costs meanwhile are £1373 for Nuke, £2033 for NukeX, and £2528 for Nuke Studio.

“We are committed to lowering the barriers to entry for new customers and those adding new seats of Nuke,” said Christy Anzelmo, Chief Product Officer. "Subscription pricing enables customers to purchase more flexibly as their business grows and changes with new shows or projects.”

The company says that subscription customers will enjoy all the same benefits as perpetual license owners, with a choice of either offline or online login-based licensing system (launched recently for Nuke 14.0 onward), and floating rights enabling multiple artists or machines to share the same license.