Antics V5 Upgrade

So I was happily looking forward to the new version of Antics, until I found out it came at a heavy cost (Forum post from Brad Kolacinski Marketing Manager - Film & Entertainment Antics Technologies Inc. in response to some user inquiries):

As we no longer offer the free Home version, we're offering existing Home users to upgrade to V5 Home for only $45 and existing Pro users can upgrade to V5 Pro for just $145. Earlier Professional versions of Antics3D came with free access to the content on our old website until December 3, 2008. This has been carried across to our new site and explains why you're seeing a message about your subscription that is set to expire in December. However, this content subscription did not include the promise of any free product upgrades. Albeit, we gave everyone a free upgrade to V4 Pro anyways. If you upgrade to V5 you will be on the new subscription scheme which not only extends your content subscription through June 2009, but also entitles you to free upgrades during your new V5 subscription.

So at the V4 upgrade they took away Google Sketchup import for home users (which had been introduced at V3) so that only Pro users could use that feature (unless the user stayed with V3). The V4 upgrade was only a few months ago, and now they are upgrading again and basically turning Antics3D into a subscription based system. Does that mean every few months users are required to purchase another software upgrade? The set of feature updates is not that significant, although on the plus side they have added emotions to characters. I am not the only one unhappy about the clear lack of communication by Antics on these issues as judged by the forum posts.

May have to find another solution.