petapixel.com/2023/11/15/photo-mechanic-caves-to-industry-trends-shifts-to-subscription-model/
posted FWIW
Deleted
Nov. 16, 2023
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Sigh.
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Even 'perpetual' licenses are getting expensive now. Capture One is an example. I paid for a 'perpetual license' for Capture One 23 which was fine except all it got me was one minor fix. I assumed (wrongly) that I would get updates through 2023. In May they brought out the next version - and my version was then out of date. This month they've brought out yet another version - and the May one is out of date.
So I thought 'sod it' and got a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom for £10/month. PS & LR are better that CaptureOne anyway (in my opinion) and together they are cheaper.
Alan
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Maybe because I have been on a subscription model for year with my engineering software, I do not have any problems with this model. I have a Capture One subscription, which compared with my FEM software package, is not expensive.
I think the dodging and burning tools in C1 are brilliant, so I am not tempted to migrate.
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I did buy Photo Mechanic long ago, not as an image Editor but just for Metadata control e.g. IPTC and/or XMP e.g. adding keywords, headline, caption, copyright and stuff.
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In the end, XnView MP proved to have the best Search Engine I've seen ... important to me because my images have become scattered hither and yon all over the Drive.I also have an EXIF Editor which occasionally comes in useful - because my other Viewer (FastStone) sometimes exports an edited image with another image's EXIF !!.
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As a customer, I hate subscription models, esp for applications, which I use rarely. (This is also one of reasons, why I have not got any Adobe program in my PCs :))
But as software dev myself, I can understand this trend. I can't say anything about big makers, but for tiny [desktop financial] software company 'perpetual' licensing may result in bankrupt - users are satisfied with present options and functionality, there are very few new customers (everyone already uses some software package) and so on.
For photography and video applications it is a bit simpler - customers need support for newer cameras and they must buy either updates or subscriptions. In more static areas (like accounting) customers almost do not need new features; for example we have customers, happily using our 20 year old software versions - then we used only 'perpetual' licensing model...
