Revu 20 goes dark at the end of the year
Here is what each licence type actually loses, what it costs to stay, and what it costs to leave. I sell one of the alternatives, so read the part where I tell you to stay with Bluebeam as carefully as the rest.
Download Excalibur View freeWhat happens, and to whom
| Date | What changes |
|---|---|
| 31 July 2026 | End of Support. Already passed. Bluebeam no longer takes support cases on Revu 20. |
| 31 December 2026 | End of Life. Revu 20 loses Studio Sessions, Studio Projects and API access. |
| Your serial starts with | What you keep after 31 December |
|---|---|
| 1… (perpetual) | The program keeps running on your machine. You lose Studio Sessions, Studio Projects and API access. Your files and markups are still yours and still open. |
| 96… or 98… (Open or Enterprise) | Nothing. Bluebeam's wording is that these licences are deactivated without access. You move to a Revu 21 subscription or you stop. |
Dates and wording from Bluebeam's own End of Life notice, checked 23 September 2026.
You can't buy the thing you had
Bluebeam stopped selling perpetual licences on 30 September 2023, along with maintenance plans, Open Licensing and Enterprise Licensing. There is no one-time option on their pricing page today. Every plan is per user, per year.
That is why the search box fills in bluebeam perpetual license for sale when you start typing. People are hunting for something that isn't sold anymore.
What it costs to stay
| Plan | Per user, per year |
|---|---|
| Basics | $260 |
| Core | $330 |
| Complete | $440 |
| Max | $590 |
From bluebeam.com/pricing, checked 23 September 2026. Complete is the tier most estimators I know are on.
The arithmetic for a six-seat office
| Year 1 | Year 3 | Year 5 | Year 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revu Complete, 6 seats | $2,640 | $7,920 | $13,200 | $26,400 |
| Excalibur View Office, 6 seats, updates every year | $1,500 | $2,700 | $3,900 | $6,900 |
| Excalibur View Office, 6 seats, no updates after year one | $1,500 | $1,500 | $1,500 | $1,500 |
$250 per seat once, first year of updates included, $100 per seat per year after that and optional. The bottom row is what you pay if you buy it and never renew: the version you have keeps working. Full pricing.
Stay with Bluebeam if
I would rather you read this than find it out after you switch.
- You run Studio Sessions with outside parties. Architects, engineers and owners who already live in Studio are not going to install my software to mark up with you. Nothing I have replaces that.
- Your people mark up on iPads. Revu has an iPad app and a browser app. I have neither. (A Mac is no longer a reason to stay: Excalibur View has a native Mac build, and Revu for Mac reached End of Life in June 2023.)
- You are deep in MEP coordination workflows built around Bluebeam's toolset and Quantity Link into somebody's ERP. Rebuilding that costs more than the licence saves.
- You have a 1… perpetual serial and you do not use Studio. Then nothing happens to you on 31 December. The program keeps working. Do nothing and reconsider when it stops.
What moving actually involves
Short, because it is short.
- Your drawings open as they are. Markups are ordinary PDF annotations. A set you marked up in Revu opens with those markups in place, and they go back to Revu or Adobe afterwards.
- Your tool chests come across. It imports .bpx profiles and .btx tool sets, with their tools, custom columns and unit weights.
- The free version is the whole desktop app for one person, with no account and no expiry. Install it beside Revu and run a real bid through it before you decide anything.
- The Office server is only if two or more of you work off the same sets. It runs free for 30 days from the first start, for any number of people.
Try it on the set you are bidding this week
Free for one person. No account, no email address, nothing to cancel.