In this video I stress tested Altium’s new $995/year plan on a real, very complex PCB design to answer the question solo engineers actually care about: does it pay for itself, or is it just another subscription? I walk through what’s included (Altium Designer, Projects, BoM Portal/Manager, Requirements, and MCAD co-design), but I focus on the three areas that gave me the biggest time savings on a live build—especially BoM and Requirements. The BoM Portal is where I saw immediate ROI. I uploaded a 2,000+ line Excel BoM (with alternates) and it auto-imported and auto-matched the main parts to alternates, plus it surfaced BoM health and issue flags for parts-in-use. That single workflow gave me back about 20 hours of spreadsheet wrangling—basically the yearly fee in a week if you value your time around $50/hr. Requirements was the other big win: I can tie specs directly to design items inside the project, attach files, and comment in one place. It cut the “where did that spec live?” hunting across decks and spreadsheets, and overall I’ve seen about 20–30% fewer headaches/time on my PCB/hardware builds. There were minor delays/hiccups here and there, but the interface is smooth—and for solo/small hardware teams, this is absolutely worth trying.