This practice is absolutely standard in oscilloscopes (which is what I&#x27;m right now shopping for). Additional options will set you back between a few hundred or maybe a thousand dollars&#x2F;euros easily.<p>In the past &quot;options&quot; were actual PCBs to be installed, or swapping out of pricey components&#x2F;subassemblies.<p>But software options are typically &quot;only&quot; things like being able to decode i2c&#x2F;spi&#x2F;canbus&#x2F;... from acquired traces or calculating a fourier-transform.<p>Also on the lower end models (where it doesn&#x27;t make sense to build additional hardware, because even the relatively cheap amplifiers and ADCs will be able to do a few 100MHz or few GS&#x2F;s) scope bandwidth might be artificially limited when not purchasing a software option. Some vendor also limiting the amount of used sample memory intentionally.