I think it was 99, I paid 49 because I got student discount or maybe later everyone got the 49 offer ?. Yeah, Radiance answered those emails personally :- ), it took good time until he hired first person, and then those kept cycling on and off.
It was lot of fun using brothers GTX285 I think it was, compared to MentalRay which we were briefly shown to use in school. Eventually very annoying salesperson started pushing FryRender, for which school got free licences as reward, that was super annoying, slow and strange and the marketing speech was downright retarded, appealing only to those of slowest mind... "It is spectral, so it's fully like real world"....yeah. But Octane very cool, made rendering fun.