Most of the $53.- are the costs of shipping, handling, printing the manual, and having the USB stick manufactured. As a 4.0 license owner you may simply go for the "pure download" option for $25.-

4.1 is a major upgrade from a functional point of view. The version number after the decimal point is irrelevant. When we released SB Pro PE, the first version was 2.251, the first major upgrade was then 2.419, followed by 2.538, 2.640, etc.; at the end of the day, these are nothing but sequential version number incremented by each compiler run. There is nothing else to it.

As to whether the expenses have been paid for by army customers - this is only partially true, and even then it's a logical fallacy to accept any price other than zero if one would take the argument seriously. In which case you could just as well argue that no company should make a single cent of profit as soon as all the expenses have been covered. Which is a serious economic theory, called Socialism. Measured by the amount of profit (less the amount of customer support cases) that it generates, the Personal Edition receives a disproportionately large fraction of our development time. We still do it because the Personal Edition is a good yardstick to juge ease of use/accessibility, and PE users are quicker and more vocal to report bugs.


All that being said, nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. Here's our offer. I think it's very much worth it. But value is a highly subjective thing that depends on personal preferences and the general situation. A glass of water may be worth thousands if you're lost in the desert, or worth nothing if you're caught in a rainstorm. I think that for 4.0 users, asking for $25.- for three years of the team's really hard work is seriously underpriced. But we promised the new terrain engine for version 4.0 and it took us three years longer, so I at least honor that promise with the implicit $15.- discount.