I am an IT administrator of a medium-sized company and we are currently in talks to renew our 20-20 Design maintenance and support contract. They're trying to push us over to their subscription-based service but, they're requiring us to turn in our existing perpetual licenses or else we will experience a 4x price increase (they're already forcing an over 2x price increase, even if we opt out of using their subscription-based service and continue on traditional maintence and support). I want to hang onto at least one license so that if we were to ditch 20-20 (which I keep pushing my boss to do), we would have a license to access our massive archive of designs; 20-20 won't play ball with this and says it is an all-or-nothing deal moving to their subscription-based service. I have even gone as far as asking their legal team to provide me with the license agreements that came with each of our perpetual licenses so I could try to have a lawyer find a loophole that would let us keep at least one of our licenses but, they have refused to provide us with any of this documentation thus far.

To me, this whole situation feels super anti-competitive as it is clear they're trying to pull all of their perpetual licenses off the market so that 100% of their users are stuck with paying for their software forevermore or, lose their access to their entire back-catalog of designs. I understand that a ton of companies are moving to subscription-based software and that in itself isn't anti-competitive but, most of this subscription software doesn't have a proprietary file format and if a customer were to choose to cancel their subscription, their archive of files is not lost.

What really grinds my gears is they would constantly lie to me about why they couldn't accommodate our request. "Oh, it is not technically possible for us to transfer all but one license" or "we can't have an account with both license types, it would make billing too difficult". I eventually called them on their lying as our account is currently a mix of both license types but it has all left a super bad taste in my mouth. They should've just called a spade a spade and said they simply didn't want to accommodate our request; instead, they choose to come up with excuse after excuse as to why they couldn't accommodate our super simple and reasonable request of keeping one perpetual license.

Has anyone else had any experiences with this company (positive or negative) beyond just using their software on a daily basis? Does anyone have an "in" with someone at this company that might be able to get this simple request to keep a perpetual license accommodated?

Is this software really the be-all-end-all with regard to the interior design of kitchens and baths? I have tried to convince my boss many many times that 20-20 sucks and that we should find something else and have always been told "they're the industry standard, if we moved away from 20-20 I would never be able to find a designer qualified in whatever software we end up using". I try to tell him that CAD software is CAD software and that any designer worth their salt should be able to pick up the skills to use a similar CAD program fairly quickly, but he isn't going for it. Designers, what software do you use on a daily basis?

So my father's been out of a job for a month and he's struggling to find another one.

He has hand drawn architect experience but ever since AutoCad became a thing, he couldn't keep up. He's done estimating for construction companies, granite and marble stuff, and kitchen. Now there are kids that are experts with excel and can do his hours of work in a few minutes.

Now he's finding jobs that require 2020 Design experience and he wanted me to find a way to get him this application through pirating means. I'm researching it and it's not as easy. Even with a crack, you need to pay a monthly fee and require a connected dongle to make it work. The program costs $2-3k to acquire it legally.

So now I'm thinking, why should I go through all this and he won't be able to grasp a 3D design program and he couldn't get AutoCad down? My question, is there a way my dad can learn to use this app and take lessons on it? If you have any experience, how did you acquire it? Thanks!