When Poser 4 came out it was selling for about $600 without an upgrade.  I had to wait until I got a special price to be able to afford it--same thing with Photoshop.   Poser without an upgrade is now a lot more affordable for people, then SM also offered a preorder on the upgrade to 9  of only $79.00--which I considered to be a steal--considering I could easily spend that much on content alone in one foul swoop. Most software companies offer deep discounts on outgoing versions before a new one is released--Adobe not as much but they may offer $50 off or something.  The changes between Poser 8 and 9 were more subtle than sweeping--Poser 8 is still a good version which produces good results so you can hold off until some time in the future when they may offer a better discount that you find more affordable.  Oh and I just realized I made a mistake above, the Black Friday special was for 60%--not 50%.

At least SM offers non-linear upgrades, that is you don't have to have the directly preceding version in order to get the upgrade price on the next version.  E-on requires you to have the last version of a program to get the best upgrade price and if you have the version before that you end up paying substaitailly more.  I had bought 2 versions of Vue Infinite thinking that I'd continue to get affordable pricing--but since Vue has "gone Hollywood" and is now used in many major motion pictures they've jacked up the price of Infinite so much even with an upgrade I couldn't afford it--I had to settle for a lesser version with the old interface which I don't like as much.  Such in the world of software.  Since Poser is used by a lot of graphics designers for ad work, book covers, comic books, and magazine articles we're lucky they haven't raised the price on it further.