UA’s HIC Discounts, Danexit and counseling

I think Bill Putnam still owns it. They just expanded massively. They have to compete with Waves trying to get money on the back end with hardly any up front and developers whose strategy was sell thousands of copies of low priced, very high quality plugins like Klanghelm and Tokyo Dawn. Waves had to price for their (lack) of quality for a while because their only plugins were from the 90s and early 2000s, i.e the utility plugins and the Renaissance series but their recent utility plugs like Clarity are good. These developers are able to support the plugins because of the numbers. With Plugin Alliance going private equity and just priced for growth before being flipped. Unlike them, Waves made back their initial development cost long ago for most of their popular products as did UA. They're able to drop their prices aggressively to monetize their assets further. You can see U-he do this with the Native Instruments sales and recently a brief 50% sale. You can watch Tokyo Dawn do this much more aggressively than UA. They start out at 50-100 bucks and are often 10 bucks a few years later to sell them to every guitarist instead of a couple of drinks at a bar.

The SHARC chips are underpowered compared to a modern CPU. Weiss saw the writing on the wall and then UAD did too. The Weiss hardware went from 2/3rds of new used to 1/3rd if the seller is lucky.