>Plants in Jars admitted that, while she’s far from the first person to popularize tissue culture, her tutorials and videos explaining the method have likely been a significant driver in its growth within the plant collecting community, leading to a big change in the overall market.

Sometimes a good instructor makes all the difference in the world.

Basic economics. If value is based on scarcity of a resource, and you lift the bottleneck that makes the resource scarce, the value is reduced.

In the case of software, the resource is time (you could build/host/operate that software yourself, but it takes a heck of lot more time than you're willing to spend so you trade money for the product instead), and you can't reduce the scarcity of time.

This happens in software too. When open source software like GCC came out, it suddenly became much cheaper to write C code compared to when you needed a Borland Turbo C license for $150 (1990 dollars).

I used to belong to a carnivorous plant forum. The question was raised, "WHY do carnivorous plants often die when planted in nutrient-rich (or non-poor) soils?".

One grower of Venus flytraps set aside 100's of tissue-grown clones to evaluate each theory proposed, and determined that their roots were highly susceptible to fungal attack. Presumably, they had lost this (perhaps metabolically costly) genetic defense, because they were growing in substrates that were naturally hostile to fungal growth.

Anyway, the slightly more fascinating part to me was that, for this pro grower, growing hundreds of plants on a lark was a fairly trivial exercise. I cast aside my prior image of bunny-suited lab techs with pipettes and agar jars; this was full-scale production line.