Your Hardware Team's Tool Choice Is a Business Decision. Is Anyone Treating It Like One?
By the CADPreview Team · Series: The Hardware Budget
"The most expensive decisions in a business aren't the ones that get challenged. They're the ones that don't."
Let's be direct: Altium Designer is excellent software. If your hardware team is using it, they probably chose it for good reasons. They know it, they trust it, and it works.
That's not the question.
The question is: who decided your company would pay for it, and did they ask whether you needed to?
How This Decision Usually Gets Made
A hardware engineer joins the team, or a CTO sets up the toolchain. They choose Altium. It's what they've used before, it's the professional standard, and frankly, it's a comfortable choice. Nobody is going to question an engineer for choosing the industry's most respected design tool.
But that comfort comes with a cost that renews every year. Under Altium's current pricing, a single-engineer setup on Altium Develop starts at £1,720 per year (£860 workspace + £860 author seat). Add two more engineers and you're at £3,440. These aren't one-off costs. They're commitments, and they compound.
The engineer who recommended the tool probably wasn't thinking about cash flow. That's not a criticism. It's just not their job. It's yours.
Paying for a Tool Isn't the Same as Needing It
There are products where Altium's advanced capabilities genuinely earn their price. A zero-latency trading platform where the electronics must perform to exact physical tolerances. A next-generation single-board computer where every component placement is contested. Safety-critical medical hardware where the design process itself is under audit.
For those products, at that level of complexity, the premium tooling is doing real work. The cost is justified.
But most hardware products aren't those products. They're IoT devices, industrial controllers, smart energy systems, connected consumer products. Solid, capable work that doesn't push those limits. The advanced features in Altium exist, and they go unused, and the licence renews anyway.
If a feature isn't being used, you're not paying for a tool. You're paying for a luxury. The question is whether your company, at its current stage, can afford that luxury, or whether £1,720 to £3,440 per year would do more for your business as equipment, as headcount, or as runway.
The Sunk Cost That Isn't
One reason teams stay on Altium even when it's not fully justified: the fear that switching will cost more than staying. Migrating designs, retraining engineers, rebuilding the workflow.
That fear is worth examining carefully, because it works in both directions. You don't have to commit to Altium now to use it later. KiCad's file formats export cleanly to the formats commercial platforms accept. If your company grows into the complexity that justifies the cost, with a larger team, more demanding products, and enterprise supply chain requirements, you can make that move then, with full visibility into what you're actually buying.
Starting with the capable, lower-cost tool and migrating upward when the business genuinely demands it is a legitimate strategy. Starting with the expensive tool because you might need it someday is a bet that your current runway is comfortable enough to absorb.
Three Questions Worth Asking
Before the next renewal, or before approving the initial request:
What features are we actually using? Ask your lead engineer to list them. You may find the answer is: drawing circuits, designing the board, and generating files for the manufacturer. That's the core workflow, and it runs on free tools.
Is this a technical requirement or a familiarity preference? Both are real. Only one of them justifies the spend.
What would we do with the licence cost if we didn't spend it? That's not an abstract question. It's cash flow.
What This Isn't
This isn't an argument that Altium is wrong for your team. For the right product at the right stage, the cost is justified. That article is a different one.
This is an argument that the person best placed to challenge this spending is not the engineer proposing it. They have every reason to choose the tool they know. You have every reason to ask whether the business needs it.
CADPreview gives hardware teams the collaboration and visibility layer they need: shared design views, BOM access, and revision history, without the overhead of a commercial EDA platform. If your team is working in KiCad, it closes the most important remaining gap at a cost that fits the purpose.