BeerTools Pro- Gold membership?

I was looking at investing in some brew software and was torn between beersmith and BTP until I saw the 'gold membership' on BTPs website. Is this new, I Dont remember seeing it mentioned here or there before. Reading their description makes it sound like all updates to BTP will only be available to Gold members, which is an annual $15 bucks. Kind of rubs me the wrong way. Think I will be going with Beersmith.. I dont see why you should pay an annual fee to compensate for the software's short-commings.

Any one here a gold member, and is it really worth it?

I'm not a Gold member, nor would I want to be. I "thought" the only advantage to being a gold member was the ability to upload your recipes to the web site.

I have BTP and have used it for a year and it's not bad. However with that said I have started to try out Beersmith and think that I might be leaning more towards it.

Development for BTP has seemed to come to a screeching holt and their forum is pretty quiet too.

Just my two cents.

Hi

I bought beersmith, and i find it's great. There's a great support, as I when I just got it had some technical problems. And I've even knowledge that some brewers in my country (Denmark) have had succes with writing Brad with suggestions for new tools and other features, that he then developed.

Lars

Yeah, I'm growing increasingly impatient waiting for the big feature update on BTP including the inventory feature. This is something Beersmith has and you'd think it would have been part of the initial release. It doesn't seem to be a difficult thing to impliment and it's pretty essential for folks who buy in bulk.

Bobby_M said:

Yeah, I'm growing increasingly impatient waiting for the big feature update on BTP including the inventory feature. This is something Beersmith has and you'd think it would have been part of the initial release. It doesn't seem to be a difficult thing to impliment and it's pretty essential for folks who buy in bulk.

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That was kind of my point. They want $15 dollars a year now for updates. I dunno, it really soured me on them. I went with Beersmith

I was trying to read where it says you have to have a subscription to get updates. I bought the basic $25 software and updates download for free whenever they come out (not often lately). It looks like membership just gives you the online recipe linkage both up and down.

http://beertools.com/html/gold.php
Fifth paragraph

There are more features such as a Recipe Calculator zeroing function, scaling function and more. It doesn't stop there though; the GOLD membership is our top priority for development. Any new features created here at BeerTools.com will be made available for GOLD members first, and usually these new features will not be scheduled for availability to BASIC members.

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That's refering to the beertools.com recipe generator I think, not the Beer Tools Pro standalone software. Like I said before, I've been getting the incremental updates. I'm on 1.029 right now and I believe it's current. I'm waiting for 1.1 to come out and I'm pretty sure it will be free to me.

It also says that gold members are treated as priority regarding updates. I wouldn't read into it that non members are left behind.