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For a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free. But two things are happening: First
by bensyverson 6mo ago
For a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free.
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.
- vrighter 6mo agodon't offend blender by comparing it to ai slop.
- bensyverson 6mo agoIf you think anything created with the help of agentic coding is slop, you're in for a rough (checks watch) rest of your life
- croes 6mo agoYou‘re free to share AI created polished examples
- rpastuszak 6mo agoFWIW it took me waaaaay less time to import 30k+ photos from a Lightroom catalog to Capture one than into a fresh Lightroom install. Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.
- Calavar 6mo ago> we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year Do you mind sharing a few examples?
- armadyl 6mo agoNone exist, it's literally all slop.
- timmytokyo 6mo agoA veritable "explosion"! Surely GP can name 3.
- qrobit 6mo agoI personally like marimo[^1], the developers rely heavily on AI tools afaict [^1]: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo
- jauntywundrkind 6mo agoRan into rapidraw yesterday looking for rust RAW processing (was looking for libraries or CLI tools but taking inventory as I went). Ran into rapidraw, which notably is GPU accelerated: https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw#rapidraw https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw#rapidraw The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising. And oh by the way the developer is 18 years old.
- jlarcombe 6mo agobefore Affinity was a "loss leader" for Canva, it was a profitable suite of applications in its own right