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socalgal2yesterday at 5:03 PM3 repliesview on HN

no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category.

Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH!

I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it would have taken me 7.5 hours. I paid Adobe the $120 and got it done in 1.5hrs. Those 5 hours of my life were worth far more than the $120 I paid to Adobe.

I'm not saying you should buy Photoshop or Lightroom. Rather, I'm just making the point that spending money on a good solution should not be seen as a failure. Lightroom is designed around editing lots of photos. It has tons of batch processing features and it's UI is designed to make it easy to edit lots of photos in minimal time. I'm not saying there isn't a better design, maybe there is, but so far I haven't personally run into it so I stick with Lightroom because it gives me my life back. All for the price of 2 coffees a month


Replies

moregristyesterday at 6:13 PM

It’s not the $10/mo that bothers me. It’s the nature of essentially leasing the software.

Before it was a subscription, you bought a version and could use _that version_ in perpetuity, possibly with some number of well-defined upgrades.

If you didn’t want to upgrade, your software still worked. The value proposition of the software was clear.

Now I need to decide whether paying the subscription, possibly forever, is worth the value. This just feels bad.

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hungryhobbityesterday at 5:10 PM

I disagree. For a long time, Adobe insisted it was the only product in the category: that's how we got here.

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ThunderSizzleyesterday at 5:55 PM

I don't pay for $5 coffee. I make my coffee at home, from my own grind, with just some half and half. Sure, I splurged and paid for maybe a $100 grinder or something, but that is being used for years, meaning the cost per cup is abysmal.

It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.

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