There's a solid opportunity for a good free video editor for hobbyists and creators, who might not want to spend any money just yet. If you get these users on your software, you're much more likely to convert a sale.
The free version of Resolve is still limited for more serious / professional applications; e.g. not making use of hardware acceleration, not having certain effects, and not processing certain professional workflow codecs.
With this strategy, Resolve is essentially the "go-to" for newbies into video editing.
What's so great about Resolve licensing is their lifetime license. Pay $295 once, get it forever. For commercial productions, Blackmagic gets their $$$$$ from their cameras, physical control panels and hardware, etc. These, again range from good value (for entry and mid level) to expensive.
So I work daily in resolve. I had a project come up at home, where i was like oh ill just use resolve as it has everything we need.
Within 2 minutes, I was running into features i needed to pay for. Within 20 minutes I had bought a home copy because of how integral it is to my workflow.
They get people in by being able to do the basics, but anything remotely complex, you pay for.
I think a lot of users acquire the Studio license similar to myself as well, being a free user for a long time and when I finally went looking for my own shooting device, BlackMagic Pocket Cinema was a no brainer and includes a Studio license.
I wouldn't describe blender as following this formula. The only thing they sell (last time I checked) is blender studio, which as far as I'm aware is more just another way to donate while getting some things in return.
They make their money on very nice, very expensive professional control surfaces, cameras, and lots of other gear. Davinci Resolve is free because they realize funneling people into their ecosystem, having them learn how to use Resolve, instead of Avid/FCP/Lightworks/Premier/etc, which means that's what they're going to go with when they have the money to spend on gear. It'll just work better together. Like if you buy all Apple products instead of random company's stuff.
I'd think it also incentivizes Adobe et al. to make sure their software doesn't break the BlackMagic hardware, because there's a viable alternative (especially with the Studio version being included with the hardware).
Blackmagic is primarily a hardware company, yes, but the free version of Resolve doesn’t cut it for professional work. As soon as you start doing anything serious, you need Studio. It is, however, only $299 one time and works for all versions including upgrades.
The free version doesn't allow GPU accelerated playback or editing or rendering which is a must for any serious user / business.
They get people in the door with a really powerful free editing software, and once you've invested time into learning it and made it part of your workflow, you want to pay the £300 to upgrade because it's too much hassle to learn a new editor, and Resolve is awesome, but you reallly don't want to keep waiting 3hrs to generate 1/8th res optimized media for your whole project before you can preview at more than 10fps on an i7 Extreme Edition (that's how they got me, if you couldn't tell).
It's an effective free -> paid product-led conversion path to acquire customers. Being on HN and presumably working in tech/SaaS, this is a familiar and effective business strategy.
Yes, while many serious users will need to go up to the paid version of Resolve, mainly they want to sell you cameras, capture and playback hardware, vision switchers (like the ISO ones that record the individual streams and then create a Resolve project for you to re-edit it if you want).
My friend, please stop giving them ideas. Anyways, I'm not a professional and Davinci Resolve (free) is the good enough editor for me. I think this is macOS, iOS is free but Apple sells hardware kinda free.
