I know that DxO always says that PhotoLab and PureRaw are different products, but refusing to offer crossgrade pricing shows a bit of disinterest in maintaining customer loyalty. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has gotten tired of constantly comparing and upgrading 3-5 raw processors, has decided that PhotoLab (while it has strengths) isn’t going to be the best single option, and would probably pick up PureRaw on a crossgrade from PhotoLab if it existed. So, every year, I decide not to upgrade PhotoLab, then take a look at the price of PureRaw and decide that it’s not worth paying more than the upgrade price on PhotoLab to just get it’s demosaicing and denoising as a plugin. So, no sale.
They could even make the customer choose between upgrading PhotoLab or using it to crossgrade to PureRaw, and once you’ve done one for a given license, you can’t do the other.
Who knows what the future holds. It might depend on the licensing system DxO is using (which I’m sure they didn’t develop in-house). But also, only DxO knows what their budget is - how much they need to charge per product in order to break even or turn a profit. I don’t see how anyone can really draw conclusions without info like that.
Moreover, DxO has to pay salaries on a regular basis and I suppose that licenses are sold quite unevenly distributed through the year.
Offering crossgrades to a lower cost product is not what I’ve seen yet, usually you can get crossgrades if you step up. Offering an incentive to achieve lower income feels unlogical from a business point of view - unless the risk of losing a great number of customers grew.
My conclusions were based on DxO’s consistent historical precedent. Notice, I did not indicate it would never happen, merely that it was very unlikely.