If you are going to continue to use the software, why wouldn't you stay on maintenance? There are other enhancements and tech support that provide value. At the risk of sounding condescending, there is no logical way a person would have selected Alibre for its mesh capabilities. They were never that good.
If you are going to find another solution that offers mesh support, then why worry about going back on maintenance later? You have a new solution. If Alibre's replacement solution (whenever it gets implemented) ends up being better than the one you picked, then you pay to switch back.
This seems like a very simple business decision that is getting obfuscated by trying to hold onto some sort of sunk cost. I have work-arounds for all my CAD systems. I can either choose to continue the daily expense of the work around or I can go find a better solution. Software features get deprecated all the time. You basically have 3 choices:
- Stay on the legacy version that still has the feature at the cost of losing any time-saving enhancements.
- Upgrade to the new version at the cost of creating work arounds for the deprecated feature.
- Pay for a new system and the cost of migrating legacy data or working in a multi-CAD environment.
Analyze the costs. Analyze the benefits. Pick the option with the better ratio.
And yes, one option may be to save money by stopping maintenance. Invest that money and then take the future value to buy back in at a later date.
For example, for one software, I know that my payback period for maintenance is 3 years. I can drop maintenance but it'll take 2.8 years to save enough to break even on buying that license back. On that same system, I don't upgrade it with every version. I do, though, upgrade at least every 3 years. That's the break-even point for maintenance. If I don't upgrade at least every 3 years, I don't need to pay maintenance.
Thinking that you need a new version of software every year because that's what your maintenance dollars pay for is foolhardy. Scrum and Agile development methods don't work that way. A new version is just nomenclature. (Don't you realize that 2018.1.1 is a new version? Unless you have a different software vendor, then it would only be a maintenance pack or a service pack, not a version.) Subscription only is becoming the norm. Tools like Onshape and Fusion 360 don't have versions anymore. Based on the mentality of "maintenance = annual new version," there would never be any value in using either of those tools.