Will DaVinci Resolve Studio upgrades stay free? Grant Petty hints at change

Grant Petty has again flagged that DaVinci Resolve Studio upgrades may eventually carry a charge — but Resolve 21 is still free. How long can that last?s.

Blackmagic has announced DaVinci Resolve 21, with a host of new features including the ability to apply node-based resolve color grading workflows to still images for the first time. 

It is, as ever, a fairly hefty new release. And, if previous years are anything to go by, it will add plenty of more features too as it transits from public beta now to stable final release around IBC time.

But one comment has rung alarm bells amongst the post community, and that's where Blackmagic CEO, Grant Petty, started talking on his mammoth NAB 2026 preview live stream about pricing.

"DaVinci Resolve 21 is a free download, so the update will also be free. But the full DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 update will also be free of charge." he said. "Now, I think at some point some of these larger updates... we could have an upgrade charge, but we haven't really charged for any of these upgrades yet. And the reason is because we have a lot of people buying DaVinci Resolve Studio. That's helping pay for the engineering team."

$295 is a lot less than $350,000

Unpacking that, it seems that eventually, the company might be looking to charge for future updates to the currently $295 DaVinci Resolve Studio. Given the way most competitor business models have evolved away from the lifetime purchase option, that doesn't feel too surprising. Eventually the headroom has to be filled, the market has to slow down, and everyone that was going to buy the software will have bought it. That's when you have to start thinking about revenue, especially if you also support a free version.

DaVinci Resolve Studio has been $295 since at least 2021, and even that is a reduction since DaVinci Resolve 12 Studio launched for the Mac for $499 in 2015 (the cross-platform version was still $995). How many other things have you bought recently that are actually the same price or even cheaper than they were over a decade ago?

So, when will the charges start? Petty actually said exactly the same thing in his NAB 2025 presentation, and plenty of people were expecting DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 to be the version that added a charge. Given that it has failed to appear again this year but the company is obviously thinking about it, it would be reasonable to expect DaVinci Resolve Studio 22 to come with an upgrade fee.

But, Blackmagic does like to confound expectations, and increasingly Resolve is serving as a gateway to an entire ecosystem, so keeping those barriers to entry as low as possible is very much part of the company's mission. Besides, it's always good to remember where we were before Blackmagic bought DaVinci in 2009.

"Remember the DaVinci was a $350,000 system, the top system was $850,000," Petty told the Building a Unicorn podcast. "We bought it out on a Mac for a thousand dollars. And now in fact there's a free version..."