But in 2000 I can’t tell you the number of times industry pundits told us we were insane. And we hoped the payoff for the company would be a steady revenue “annuity” from the subscription model. Instead of big revenue surges from product releases, some of which were sure to lack useful updates, we intended to rapidly evolve Revit for the subscription price (which, of course, we did).

This unity of product and distribution was a major selling point to our investors and a major differentiator for Revit Technology. In 2000, I believe this may have been a first industry-wide. The engineering team, as creative in product marketing as it was in developing never-before-seen parametric technology for architecture, embedded the subscription model in the product. The software industry as a whole has completely migrated to this packaging model. Consider the software subscriptions you never think twice about paying for today: Microsoft 365, Apple iCloud, Netflix and more. To say we were early on this idea is an understatement. Interestingly, you could stop and start the subscription, too, though obviously we hoped architects wouldn’t.

Revit shipped as a subscription product with a simple monthly per-seat charge you could put on a credit card directly from the product. That meant that thousands of dollars for a perpetual license plus maintenance per user for AutoCAD was a real burden on them. Most architects in the US at that time worked in firms of 10 or less people. One of the issues that the founders (Leonid Raiz and Irwin Jungreis) and the CEO (Dave Lemont) wanted to address was cost. Let’s start with the packaging and go-to-market.

The ideas behind the initial market launch were so original back in the day (and so common today) that I wanted to make sure that history knows what we were thinking and how novel it was for the time. In this post, I want to share some screenshots of Revit 1.0 and the original packaging and go-to-market model. But I have never actually written about the product itself. Readers may remember two posts I wrote (as long as eight years ago!) about the early days at Revit: one about the launch party and one to preserve for antiquity the original Revit Technology Corp. This birthday post is a bit late (it’s October) - but Autodesk’s interest in Revit’s history motivated me to write this reminiscence of the product’s launch 20 years ago. That reminded me that Revit release 1.0 was launched in April, 2000. I recently received a message from a product manager at Autodesk asking about Revit 1.0.

Revit licence cost