Now they drop the price. 
Its a great price but when I did head to head in some mixes with this and B-3X I always preferred the X. So I’m actually passing on it. But I know it has some fans here that maybe haven’t bought it yet so went ahead and posted it. Seems there’s always these price drops if you wait long enough, plus I think UAD is maybe throwing some elbows right now with low prices to butt their way into the Native plugin market in a big way. Love it! Waiting for their Lexicon 224 to drop, its really really good.
From memory their licensing sucks, however?
I don’t care about the low prize.
If the licensing system doesn’t fit my needs as a paying customer I ignore the product.
Personally, I don’t find the licensing any different than anyone else doing iLok with two activations per license. The UA Connect software can get kind of clunky at times but it does not have to be running in order to use the plugins.
So do the UAD plugins require a hardware dongle when offline? That would be a show stopper for me in a live performance setting.
It looks like you either have to use a hardware iLok or be logged in to the net. I just checked and they don’t do authorize to computer. And it doesn’t work when I disabled my network adapter for a few minutes to test offline.
$20 less than my purchase from pluginboutique - I can live with that 
I am using it in live performance, but it took awhile to make UAD use a dongle, instead of wi-fi authorization. Not my preference, but I use a digital iLok with AS B5 with no problems. That is why @Ade and I wrote UAD about using the digital iLok. No luck on that yet. So far, no problem with dongle. Just another usb port on my multi-port device. UAD apparently never thought about live performance, as all their products are geared to studio use. If you buy this, or not, send an email to UAD to use digital iLok.
I use digital ILOK as I have no spare USB ports for a dongle, so a no go for me.
I know USB hubs are generally frowned upon for routing midi thru, but that said, I have them on my Dell monitors for my main DAW and run midi thru them all the time no problems. So its probably possible to find one that works fine. But I agree, activating to the computer is the right way to do it. Its not like most other vendors aren’t doing it, and obviously they don’t think they’re getting their software pirated as a result. I tend to get peeved every time the license enforcement topic gets going. Here we are doing the right thing and paying the license fees and not running cracks, yet we’re the ones punished with all the license enforcement headaches. Argh!
That’s why I use “powered” hubs because they are not dependent on computer power, and midi flows freely without nasty old power stealing the stream. 
I have a powered 7 port powered hub and I still do not have a spare slot. So unless I change my rig…
LOL, just couldn’t resist a good sale, so grabbed it with an hour and a half left. But sonically it really is a different enough animal from B-3X to at least sort of justify it I suppose. Yeah, we’ll go with that…
UAD should be directed to this thread again.
Totally agree. I sent #3 request 2 days ago. I also need to hit their forum again.
UA Connect is an absolute disaster. I have a slow internet connection, and the program regularly slows down my entire internet. There’s no way to turn it off and no timeline. I receive error messages, and despite having the dongle, the license isn’t recognized, and so on and so forth. That’s where I appreciate Blue3: enter the serial number, and it works!
I agree UA Connect sucks. But, if you have a dongle, just turn off UA Connect autostart. I have the dongle and my UA Connect is does not run in background.
I only turn it on to install new UAD intruments/effects. Then I turn it off back (via Task Manager).