Irrelevant; such a license would be purchased by the business and wrote off as a loss on the income/loss sheet.
Needless to say, for a business a few or even several thousand dollars a year is practically nothing if it's critical to business operations and ensuring productivity.
If you're buying this for your own personal use? Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of disposable income or some really good justification. For your own small business use? Yeah, you're gonna need to justify that cost against your estimated annual income and other losses.
What's irrelevant to what? The actual market for CAD software is well funded businesses that are buying it as a productivity tool, so of course their approach to the cost is very relevant when trying to understand the pricing.
The context was the cost of a Solidworks license within the purchasing power of an average salary. Meaning the question posed was whether an employee could buy a Solidworks license.
To that, I say that is irrelevant because just like you said: It's the company that buys and pays for the license, not a singular employee on a salary.
The salary of the employee provides the basis of their cost to the company, so any tool that increases their productivity for a small portion of that cost is something they are going to consider.
I wasn't imagining that the typical person making $60k year would enjoy blowing thousands of dollars on a CAD package. This is why they aren't cheap though, because typical people don't buy CAD packages, companies do.
Needless to say, for a business a few or even several thousand dollars a year is practically nothing if it's critical to business operations and ensuring productivity.
If you're buying this for your own personal use? Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of disposable income or some really good justification. For your own small business use? Yeah, you're gonna need to justify that cost against your estimated annual income and other losses.