IMO, customers should not have to guess if there will be a bigger or smaller discount 2 weeks later!
This is what happened, and its pretty clear it was planned.
Discount X%… people buy it, then 2 weeks later the discount is higher… you have blocked all your initial upgrades from a better discount.
Nice for the company, it does not cost them as much.
Not nice for the customer who feels taken for a ride.
Not good customer relations. Particularly when another upgrade is broken.
Richard
Nope. The 30% deal ended on November 14th. The 50% deal appeared less than two weeks later. I took advantage of much of the 31 day trial before I elected to purchase just before November 14th.
Check out the bundles. Some of them cost more CHF than getting the separate items 
Best buy in USD!
I don’t think those bundles ever came close to buying separately 
if you just paid for it a week ago, you should send a ticket and they should give you a refund, isn’t their policy if it’s less than 2 weeks you paid for?
a price correction maybe? still only paid just a week ago.
The amount of salt in this thread is huge, 
Too bad the amount entitlement is also high. Ask yourself why are you entitled for the huge Black Friday discounts if you are not willing to wait before Black Friday. You can’t have those price levels all year long.
Wait till you discover discount chasing communities like slickdeals (dot net) and then learn that half of your camera gear purchases could have been 30% less easy.
remember that there’s a lot of salt in water 
It’s not about entitlement. At all. It’s about vendor behaviour and the lens that creates. That’s all. Perhaps the “entitlement” in this thread is from those who feel some kind of elevation above the issue. If you don’t care how others fare, then perhaps don’t comment on the thread.
So which “vendor behavior” do you found wrong here?. To be more specific here are the steps of people who actually did the work to make PL5 happen:
Now we have this thread of discussion regarding of ~$45 difference between what people who were not able to use PL5 before BF discount and people who started using PL5 immediately from the release date. Which, I agree, is quite a bit of money - you can buy a lens filter, or maybe a copy of your camera battery, or a black rapid/peak design strap, or about a month of subscription for Adobe Create Cloud apps, etc.
Seeing as you are apparently not reading what I am saying, I shall no longer read this thread.
While you are obviously correct it does still leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Last year I had an almost identical situation with a Canon R6 I bought a month before black Friday. It was heavily discount for the BF sale.
Now only the reason I know that is because ‘Orms’ - the dealer phoned me to tell me! And they wanted my bank details so that they could deposit the difference direct into my account! It was not a trivial amount either - about 18% of an R6 price!
So guess what, I will stick with Orms as my supplier.
Reminds me of this
The same happens every year, DXO release the latest version of PhotoLab and/or other software at a discount, a month later the Black Friday sales are on. I knew this myself but decided to go for the upgrade pricing once I’d tried out PL5 and FilmPack 6 and decided it was worth it. By some luck I managed to purchase an upgrade to the PL+FP bundle for the USD price which brought the price down further (I’m in the UK).
If you ignore the intro offer on a new version of PL, there’s a chance that there won’t be a BF offer, but based on previous years, that’s highly unlikely. As other’s have said, it’s best to download the trial of the latest version, use it for 31 days by which time the Black Friday offers have arrived.
I’m pretty sure though, that the BF offer of 50% off doesn’t apply to upgrades (there is a discount but not 50%), but happy to be corrected on that.
Put it your calender: do not buy DxO update before last Friday in November (25.11.2022) - that could help - and make it due 1 or 2 month before that date 
I (OP) see lots of comments about “waiting for the best deal” but nothing about the economic fundamentals of discounts.
To stay in business any company has to both cover its costs and generate a “reasonable” profit. It can do this in several ways, two of which are:
Sell at a unit price for the entire year that covers cost plus reasonable profit for the product. No discounts, freebies or other goodies for the entire year. This is the lowest possible price for the product if the company is to stay in business.
Run periodic discounts (freebies, bonuses, whatever). In order to cover the costs and reasonable profit this means that the base price (1 above) has to be increased so that the sum of the revenues with and without discounts is what you had planned.
The same applies to software upgrades except the cost base should not include the original development and operating costs etc. It should only cover the cost of the new features and a reasonable profit on them.
Unless the company is taking a loss on discounts (which is not a good idea), the discounted price must be greater than the true cost (item 1). This means that discounts are simply an illusion, with a discount you’re paying close to what you should have paid in the first place and everybody else is being overcharged.
If you run multiple promotions, at the same or different discounts, which are spaced throughout the year, then the amount of the discount is not particularly relevant. However, if you run back-to-back discounts (in this case a couple of weeks apart) the amount of the discount becomes important. Anybody who buys on the first discount is precluded from buying on the second. Not a problem if the second discount is lower, but if it is higher then you’ve effectively locked out the first group of customers. This is what DxO did here.
All these are deliberate decisions known in advance but not disclosed to customers. Customers should not have to gamble that the “next discount” is going to be higher than the current one. There is absolutely no guarantee that there will be a discount on any date or for any amount, it is simply a gamble. Even if “this is what happened last year” it does not mean it will happen this year, or next year.
The timing issue has a ready solution, space the release and its discount well apart from any other discounts (maybe six months).
Unfortunately, business, in general, seems to be locked into the concept of “you’ve got to have a sale” to get the product out of the door. There are significant cost implications in this for customers, for most of the year you are being overcharged for the product.
Richard
you forgot one thing, this is pandemic period and many business are going down and closing doors. None of DxO staff had replied in here or said anything about the why and what about, and I wouldn’t neither. You need it because of a new camera than go for it and if your camera is already supported than no worries to upgrade.
black friday doesn’t mean it will be 50% off as many if not all other software don’t even offer more than 20% (sorry yes adobe 40%).
you got it at 30%, what’s wrong with that?
Yes, that is important. But it is not relevant to the overall economic logic. DXO decided on their strategy and could be assumed to have considered that.
Selling at a loss just makes it worse.
Richard
Hi there, this is my first post in this forum and unfortunately not to discuss DxO’s admittedly great products but their dreadful sales tactics. I also have been taken for a ride as someone in this thread described it…
What really annoys the heck out of me is that within a period of 2 months and 4 days I had to upgrade software that felt I just purchased and then get fooled with an upgrade discount that is a few weeks later lowered another 20% or so.
On top of that, I purchased FP5, a software that is over 5 years old, to then be told a few weeks later there is a new version and I get bugger all of a discount and being fooled as described above. I should have gotten a massive discount or free upgrade even.
On top of all that, I contacted DxO support that I feel overcharged and am being told in short replies “we are sorry but we don’t change our pricing policy” and no, I won’t be able to talk to anyone else other than that one support assistant.
What kind of a company is this?
As with any product: decide if it’s worth the price for you, pay if the answer is yes and you can afford it, and don’t look back.