I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?

I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.

It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time.

For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.

But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite).

Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year.

I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.

If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.

We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.

I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally.

If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.

But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once alternatives (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years.

Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...