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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Man I dunno, for the sector they're in, folks are pretty likely to already be paying for a subscription to the Adobe suite, and honestly I think the whole "subscription" thing is gonna strangle Adobe in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, and/or were easier to pirate.

Also I have a piece of hardware I bought from the Astropad folks and if the app suddenly stops working because they demand a subscription I'm gonna be pretty damn unhappy.

Part of the problem, of course, is that app stores have completely killed "upgrade pricing". There's no good way for your existing users to give you money for "hey we added some new features and fixed some bugs" without bullshit workarounds like "okay the new version is a totally new app, go buy it".

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> in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, and/or were easier to pirate.

In the future when? Isn't that now? Adobe changed to subscription model in 2013. Everyone that is paying subscription now grew up with the buy-once model, right? In the future, people will have grown up with adobe's current subscription model.

Yeah I think it may be about now. And now that I think about it very few of the younger pro artists in my circles are using Adobe’s stuff, they’re using Clip Studio or Procreate for the most part.

The Affinity line of apps are also pretty great, and have (I think) full feature parity across desktop and iPad.

Affinity Designer not having DXF / DWG import export...

Is preventing me from using it in a professional capacity.

I purchased Affinity Designer without checking for the feature, and people have been asking for the feature for at least 5 years.

Edit to add the forum link I forgot to paste in:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/6756-dxf-o...

I think a lack of support for spot colors was one of my sticking points, personally. That and 20+ years of Illustrator work to pull resources out of to make new images faster, and multi-year projects meticulously built to maximize re-use and speed, and honestly that's the killer feature for me at this point unless Adobe completely falls apart.

Not that Illustrator lacks its share of long-running requests, "rotate the view" has been near the top of their publicly-voted bug/feature request site ever since they opened it, and would be "picked up shortly" back in 2017. https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-...

(And I know I was asking for it years before they abandoned the old "here's a hole to put your bugs and feature requests into" setup.)

Some time ago I wanted to do something in photoshop and the old < $100 home version they used to sell would have done the trick. But they wouldn’t sell it to me anyone, instead wanting me to pay a subscription, which I was unwilling to do for an ”a few times a year” task. So I looked for alternatives and found Affinity Photo. Now I doubt that I will ever pay for photoshop.

Isn't the monthly subscription model even better for tasks you only do a few times a year, since you can subscribe when you want to use it and deactivate when you're done?

No, because I would have to pay for a full month to just use it once (Photoshop, IIRC, is $20/m so it would only take 5 uses to be up to the $100 I would have paid).

> in the future when there's a generation of artists who grew up using other tools that were buy once, use until upgrading something else breaks it, and/or were easier to pirate.

I'd like to believe it but I don't think its true. Adobe has done quite well out of subscriptions and I expect that to continue.

Thanks for buying Luna! :)

We've never taken features away and put them behind a subscription paywall, and we never intend to! So don't worry about that!

Also hardware allows us to have the upgrade pricing model you described. If we make a hardware device that's even better than the Luna you have now, you can choose to upgrade! Escaping the App Store model has been a really refreshing part of making hardware.

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