Yes - we accept official purchase orders from accredited institutions, including schools, universities and corporations.
For fastest service, please fax or e-mail your order to us (see our contact details).
We accept Visa, Mastercard and JCB (Japan Credit Bank) cards. Sorry, we do not accept American Express cards.
You can order online with your card, or you can fax your details to us (see our contact details).
Yes, but only if you order online.
Note that if you fax or mail your card details to us, we have to use our manual system, which is only authorized for payments in British Pounds Sterling (GBP).
VAT ("Value-Added-Tax") is applicable for any orders in the European Union - so if you are outside the E.U. (e.g., in North America or Japan), then you do not have to pay VAT. You may, however, be liable for local and/or national taxes in your own country.
We are obliged, under E.U. law, to charge VAT on all European Union orders - unless you supply your organisation's VAT number. (Note: UK customers have no choice: VAT is charged on all orders, unless you have a medical research exemption.)
Yes, if you buy the equivalent licence for both platforms. For example, if you purchase a Small Group licence for Windows, then you qualify for the same, Small Group licence for Mac, at the upgrade price.
Please note that you cannot mix different licence types (e.g., "Small Group" for Windows and "Personal" for Mac).
Sorry, no. In order to keep our education prices as low as possible, they are only available to students and faculty directly involved in teaching.
Note that our "standard" prices are just that: they're set at very-reasonable levels, and designed for a wide range of researchers in government and other laboratories. Please don't confuse these prices with the outrageous "commercial" prices demanded by some other vendors.
Sorry, no. In order to keep our education prices as low as possible, they are only available to students and faculty directly involved in teaching.
Note that our "standard" prices are just that: they're set at very-reasonable levels, and designed for a wide range of researchers in government and other laboratories. Please don't confuse these prices with the outrageous "commercial" prices demanded by some other vendors.
No. The personal licence must only be used by yourself. If you need to share the software with other users you can upgrade to group licence.
For example, you could upgrade to a Small Research Group licence - which allows up to 5 users - for the cost of one single licence(*): that's great value and offers you considerable flexibility.
(*) A Small Research Group licence, when purchased on its own, costs the same as two Personal licences. When upgrading your licence, you pay the difference between what you have, and the new licence cost - assuming that you have a current-version licence. If you have a licence for an older product, you will need to upgrade this to the current version first.
We'd recommend a Personal Licence for yourself (or possibly a group licence if you want to share the software with other researchers in your group), plus a Classroom licence for your teaching lab.
For the best value, consider an annual departmental licence - this works particularly well if your department has an annual IT budget that you can "leverage". If, on the other hand you only have access to "one-off" funding, then a (perpetual) Classroom Licence might be more appropriate.
No; the user limit in our group licences refers to the maximum number of named individuals licensed to use our software - and NOT the number of concurrent users (or "seats"). So, for example, if you had five specific people in mind: Joe, Sally, Marge, Fred and Eric, then they could install the software on their own machines, as part of a 5-user group licence. However, you couldn't have any other people using the software.
For the maximum flexibility across an academic department, we recommend an annual Departmental or Campus licence. Alternatively, if your funding is of the one-off variety, you might wish to purchase a Group licence for research use, and perhaps a Classroom licence for teaching - both of which are "perpetual" licences.
YES! Any full-time undergraduates associated with the host department - i.e., currently engaged in teaching provided by that department - are allowed access to the software, even if they are not officially considered "members" of the department.
We think it is a vital part of the learning experience for students to have access to our software on their own machines. They then have the flexibility to engage with the software in their own time, to improve their visualization skills, and understanding of diffraction.
Please note the emphasis on full-time students. Departmental (and campus) licences are designed for conventional colleges and universities, and not for more diffuse "distance-learning" institutions.
No. Please don't confuse our per-user limit with a concurrent-usage limit. Our group licences are designed for distinct research groups, where there is a fixed number of individuals who will be using the software (e.g., John, Sally, Victoria, Casandra and Roberta).
To share the software across an entire department, your best option is to purchase an annual departmental site licence.
Only if you have purchased a Departmental or Campus site licence. You must not "share" Personal, Group or Classroom licences over a network.
Absolutely. We offer the most-flexible "site" licensing in the industry, letting you use the software on any of your machines, wherever you need to do so, be this at home, on vacation, during a conference, in the classroom, or your office - provided the software is only ever used by you, or other members of the licensed department/institution.
Normally, Group and Classroom licences remain the property of the original department, and you would be expected to purchase a new licence for your new institution. However, in certain cases, it may be possible to transfer your licence to your new institution - please contact us for more information.
You can upgrade from, say a 5-user to a 10-user group licence, simply by paying the difference in price (this assumes that your licence is up-to-date; if you have an older version of the software, you'll need to upgrade that to the current version first).
The short answer is no: our Group licences are for a single platform, because this allows us to offer them at lower prices, and gives you greater flexibility when planning your purchases. Let us explain...
Aside: We did consider offering "cross-platform" licences, but soon realized this would not work in practice: Firstly, we would have to make such a licence more expensive, to cover the costs of developing and supporting both platforms. Secondly, many customers only require software for one platform, and would, no doubt, ask for a cheaper, single-platform option...
We've therefore come up with what we think is a more-flexible solution: we provide lower-cost, single-platform pricing, but offer a big discount - 50% - to purchase the software for a second platform.
The way this works is as follows: you purchase the software for one platform, e.g., a Small Research Group licence for Windows, then get the equivalent licence for the other platform for half price (i.e., our upgrade price).
When you begin, or renew your site licence, we send your official contact a new disc with all of the latest software and licence codes. In addition, during the period of your site licence, you are welcome to download our free, incremental product updates.
From time to time, we also produce major new product versions, e.g., from, say "CrystalMaker 3 to CrystalMaker 4". These are paid upgrades, and are not available for free download - but you will of course receive the latest software when you renew your licensing agreement. You will not automatically receive new software before that date, and your existing licence codes will not automatically work with newer versions.
If you really cannot wait for the major upgrades, we may, at our discretion, make the upgrades available to you, subject to a formal request from your official contact, made to our sales department (sorry, but we cannot respond to potentially thousands of requests from individual users at the licensed site). We should emphasize, however, that this is not guaranteed, and goes well beyond our terms of service. We do endeavour to accomodate our users' requests, subject to our current workloads, but the annual site licensing is designed on the basis of providing latest software on an annual basis.
We don't charge for upgrades until we release a major new version (i.e., with a higher first-digit version number). For example, upgrading from CrystalMaker 7.1 to 7.2 is free, whilst 7.x to 8.2 would require payment.
Existing, registered users can download free incremental updates from the updates page on this site. To purchase a major upgrade, please refer to our education or standard order forms, or use the online sales links on this site.
Major new versions of CrystalMaker for Mac (version 8) and Windows (version 2) were launched on 7 January 2008. Customers who purchased software within two months of that date, i.e., after 7 November 2007, may qualify for a free(*) upgrade, subject to the following conditions:
Customers who purchased the software before 7 November 2007 are of course entitled to purchase an upgrade. You get great new features for a special, low price.
Unlike certain corporations, we don't seek to crank out fee-generating upgrades to a pre-set timetable. Instead, we continually update and improve our products, releasing a regular flow of free incremental updates to all registered users. Of course, from time-to-time we do release major upgrades - but we do this only when we're ready - which isn't easy to predict - hence we don't comment on work in progress.
You can rest assured that, if you do buy a new licence shortly before we bring out a major new version, you'll qualify for what is effectively a free upgrade (see note above).