I learned about this practice today. The normal way of landlording software is to allow you the privilege of buying monthly or yearly subscriptions. But Autodesk lets you buy “tokens”. Their software costs certain tokens per day. According to their estimator, AutoCAD costs 7 tokens a day for example. “A Flex user uses tokens to open a product for 24 hours (one day).” The math is pretty bad. Buying tokens becomes uneconomical (vis-a-vis a subscription) if you use AutoCAD for 8 or more days in a month. Of course, this plan is marketed as “Autodesk Flex”.

I hate software companies.