In a post from Andreas:
Well, of course it’s great, even fantastic - for Adobe. They can lure you in with low prices, then gradually make the subscription more expensive, and then move the features you use to the “premium” tier where you have to pay even more. Not to mention that they can remove features on a whim if they feel like it, or charge you even more if you want to keep them. And if you want to keep access to your files, you have to be subscribed until the end of time - “nice pictures you have there! It’d be a shame if you couldn’t open them because you decided to opt out of our subscription model, wouldn’t it?”
I dislike subscriptions. I rage-quit everything Adobe a few years ago in a huff about subscriptions and, well, I don’t love Adobe. However, I’m once again paying a subscription to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.
Why? First, because the product is, overall, more appropriate for me than the alternatives. And second, in seven years of subscribing to the Adobe “Photography” plan, none of the things Andreas mentioned have happened. The price is the same (I’d happily pay double). They’ve only ever added features (I don’t remember a single feature being removed. Has there been any?) If I cancel my subscription, I still have 100% access to my files (I just can’t make additional edits).
I’m not trying to single out Andreas. His post just reminded me that these “What if…?!” doomsday scenarios have guided way too many of my decisions. What if [SOME APP] stops being developed? What if Apple behaves even more badly? What if some “proprietary” (usually sqlite, so not really) database becomes corrupted? What if I can’t read [FILETYPE] in 50 years?
Of course these things can happen, but how often do they? Basically never, has been my personal experience. And if they do happen, there’s almost always a reasonable way out.
Why suffer using something we don’t love, on a just-in-case, instead of something we do love and find immediately more useful, because “what if!?”