Wednesday, July 13th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

PipelineFX introduces metered licensing for Qube!


Qube! 6.8’s ArtistView in action. Developer PipelineFX has just introduced new pay-per-minute metered licensing for the renderfarm manager, supplementing its existing per-day and per-month subscriptions.

PipelineFX has extended its payment options for Qube!, its renderfarm management system, adding pay-per-minute metered licensing to its existing daily and monthly subscriptions.

How metered licensing works
Qube! users begin by buying one of two base packages, giving them one perpetual Supervisor and five perpetual Worker licences for the software. Updated: see note below.

The package can then be scaled to the size of the user’s render farm by buying additional Workers, either as perpetual licences or via the various pay-as-you go options.

Those already included subscription plans charged at $2/day or $15/month per Worker, to which PipelineFX has now added the option to be billed by the minute per Worker, at a rate equivalent to $0.10/hour.

Users are billed at the end of each month for the total time used.

Pay per-minute only when new licences are in use
The system scales automatically according to demand and availability: all of the artists’ workstations in a studio can be co-opted as render machines overnight, for example.

Metered Supervisor licences also provide Worker licenses needed to render on cloud instances on demand.

Existing perpetual and subscription licences are counted before metered licences, so users only pay while the additional Worker licences are in use.

Updated: PipelineFX tell us it’s also possible to run only metered licences, although they expect most customers will use perpetual licences for dedicated render machines, and metered for desktops and cloud instances.

Similar to Deadline on Demand, but with some practical differences
The announcement follows Thinkbox Software’s embrace of metered licensing earlier this year with the release of Deadline 8, the latest update to its own renderfarm management system.

Unlike with Qube!, usage of additional Deadline on Demand licences is pre-paid in blocks of 50 to 70,000 hours, at rates equivalent to $0.09 to $0.30/hour at time of posting.

Pricing and availability
Qube! is available now for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Base packages cost $500 or $3,500 depending on whether you want to assign one job per worker, or an unlimited number of jobs per worker.

Additional perpetual Worker licences cost $80 or $300 according to the base package, or can be rented on demand at rates of $0.10/hour, $2/day or $15/month.

At time of posting, the new per-minute metered licensing isn’t avaiable directly through PipelineFX’s website: anyone interested in a metered account can contact sales@pipelinefx.com.

Read more about metered licensing for Qube! in PipelineFX’s official press release