An alternative for paying the cost upfront could be a rent-to-own option where you pay for the license in installments and until you paid the last installment it is basically a rental license, i.e. when you stop paying you lose the license, once the last installment has been paid you fully own the license as a perpetual license.
In the end you still pay the full amount, but the cost might be more bearable because you pay it smaller amounts, e.g. 85 EUR a month for 12 months if the license is 1000 EUR.
A CAD distributor over here is offering this for their CAD program, though that one costs approximately triple what Rhino costs for their “cheapest” version. (And the monthly payment is also larger of course)
we keep our pricing low and our sales policies very very simple for a reason. Every penny we spend managing that stuff is money and time taken away from development and support, which is, has been, and always will be our #1 priority.
I did that, but in my way. I opened a credit card with 0% APR (for 15 Months) and bought software. This gave me a way of spreading out my purchases across multiple months.
I think this topic is subjective, for example here in the US $1000 license is considered reasonable and one small freelance project can cover that, probably in other countries, this can be more difficult. Also, this can help offset your freelance income by claiming Rhino purchase as a business expense so it can lower your income tax. Other countries can offer different systems for taxation, so overall, It depends
Rental License can be offered as a part of cloud services like “Fra.me” when you can rent out a machine on AWS with some software preinstalled.