Question about multiple licenses

So if we jump from one to three licenses, does this mean everyone in the shop can have the program on their computers, but three can use it at once? Also, how does this work with the subscription? I have a classic license, but I guess that I will be changing that soon (to stay version-current).

Your classic license is single user, but can be activated on two computers, perhaps your desktop and your laptop. The subscriptions have similar limits, each seat is still a single user, and each user can be signed in with two of their computers. Three seats does not mean that six people can be using SketchUp at the same time, but that three people can be signed in on two computers each.

I suspect that your previous support ran out at the end of April. If it did you could renew that, with a $60 reinstatement fee, up until November 4th. Doing that one last time would make sure that you end up with a permanent 2021 license, and that support would start from the date you get around to doing that. I think you can bet that the 12 months of support will have ended before 2022 comes out, so to be on that version you would need to be on subscription by then.

There is a license type called a Network license, where everyone in the company could be using SketchUp, and the license server prevents there being more people using SketchUp than the number of seats you have paid for. A long time ago it was even possible to get that for one user, but more recently the minimum number of seats was 10. As this does give you a way to have 100 people alternating using SketchUp, by only paying for 10 licenses, those ones cost more. Typically $400 per seat per year, instead of the normal $120 per license per year.

The new subscriptions can answer some of the same need that a network license could do. For example, if you have frequent staff changes, where there are always two people using SketchUp, but only for the duration of the production of one movie (completely random example…), it would be easy for you to assign the subscription seat to the next person.

Thank you Colin.
So regarding the switch to subscription, I can stay with the classic license until 8/2021 if I renew the maintenance, and when that runs out, it will be time to switch if I desire to stay current version-wise?

Your existing installs of SketchUp will continue to work until your computer or Windows can no longer run them. I have SketchUp 1.0.3 running under Windows 10, so it might be a lot of years of continued use of the 2021 version.

If you need to either have support with us, or you like features that are in the 2022 version, you would change over to having the subscription version when your renewed classic support runs out. You won’t have the option to renew classic support next August.