The current version is $399 with a free upgrade to 2. After the release it goes up to $489. Not cheap by anybody's standards but consider this: WETA is a company with huge resources who can not only buy any program they want but could probably just hire programmers to build their own custom programs and this is what they chose. The organic modelling power of this program looks so much better than the mega-buck competition (Lightwave, Maya, Softimage, Studiomax) that I can't possibly see the other big studios not following WETA's example. AND it seems to play well with other programs. Just imagine modelling something like the above image in a relatively short time that would take a monstrous amount of man-hours normally and then rendering it in Carrara. Yeah, I know. I'm gushing. And no, I don't own stock in the company, yet.