Egads. $3500 just for a vertical-market plug-in?
This is a case-in-point example of why, as a general rule, I've always avoided mission-critical dependency upon third-party add-ons. Given that Illustrator is now only licensed via perpetual rental, that's an example of compounded dependency: Dependency upon an add-on for a particular host program, the use of which is in turn dependent upon your continued rental payments.
I'm not in the embroidery business. But it's among my wife's pretty serious hobby habits. She's having good results with Embrillance StitchArtist. Better, in fact, than some results I've seen in projects jobbed out to commercial embroidery outfits.
http://embrilliance.com/
(The ugly truth is, just as in sign-vinyl cutting and other NC output environments, a shop may have the best equipment and full expertise in operating it, but their "front end" staff may still have little or no expertise in vector graphics. I have seen, for example, commercial embroidery shops take the clean vector artwork supplied to them, rasterize it, and autotrace it in their "digitizing" workflow.)
So I do the vector-based artwork in whatever drawing program I feel like using; she imports it into StitchArtist to configure the stitching.
StitchArtist is offered in three versions ("Levels") of increasing functionality, with cross-level upgrades (at break-even pricing) should you find you need or want the next "level" of built-in features. The middle version (Level 2) is well under $400 and provides all the functionality needed for someone drawing the initial vector artwork in a mainstream drawing program.
So you can do the initial drawing in Illustrator, Corel Draw, Inkscape (free), or whatever other decent Bezier drawing program with which you're comfortable, export it to SVG, import it to StitchArtist with a single click of the Vector... button in the options bar of its main window.
In StitchArtist, she (not I) arranges the paths in the desired stitch order, selects and assigns the plethora of stitch types and detail settings, previews the result in an automatically-generated raster-based shaded simulation of the final result, and even plays the stitching in a stitch-by-stitch animation to watch for and correct technical stitching problems (ex: entry/exit of "jump" stitches). The Level 2 version also provides enough Bezier manipulation capability to make any needed tweaks without having to go back to the drawing program. When satisfied, she exports the actual stitch file in the format appropriate for the target machine(s).
Creating the embroidery-suitable artwork is straightforward for any intermediate-level user of most any mainstream vector drawing program, because you're not going to be using any software-specific "live effects" or the convoluted constructs they generate. You just need to be able to draw clean, tidy, accurate and efficient paths (don't autotrace), understand the fundamental constructs of drawing with Bezier paths (open versus closed; simple versus compound, path direction, fill rules, etc.), and otherwise bear a common-sense awareness of the physical limitations and requirements of the fabric and thread medium.
For example, depending on the stitch plan, you may sometimes need a duplicate path; a compound path to be filled with "satin" stitches and another to outline it with "running" stitches (which pretty much exhausts my knowledge of the myriad stitch types, patterns, and settings.)
JET
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