We seems to live in an era of venture capitalists and subscription business models are being choosen as the way to go for more and more software companies.
For me it was first Capture One that was taken over byb a Swedish/Danish venture capitalist company last year. Shortly after that they imposed a new business model emphazising the subscription model with a loyalty program giving an opportunity to buy a perpetual license with 20% a year subscribed and a pretty raised price.
Than also Camera Bits announced about the same type program, but except any loyalty rebates at all from what I know. I don´t know if the venture guys have taken over Camera Bits too but the pattern looks the same. I once bought PhotoMechanic Plus 6 for around 200 U$ and when I bought the Sony version of Cature One once it costed around 90 U$ - cheap as an upgrade even then. Now I pay I think 217 Euro per year.
I have really loved PM Plus and without it´s high efficiency I would never have been able to build my picture archive that handles about 70 000 pictures today. Once I tried it with Lightroom and gave up because it was too ineffective and cumbersome.
Well this is,how the pricing looks now for me:
https://home.camerabits.com/get-photomechanic/The subscription costs med now 3391:- Swedish Crowns (SEK) per year which is 296U$
A perpetual license I can buy for 5435:- SEK. In general I am of the opinion that software have been comparatively cheap compared to hardware many years but the subscription business model will make it very much expensive seen over time. .... and if I like most of us have quite a few different softwares and other subsriptions it gets pretty expensive. I have two converters and besides C1 my main converter is DXO Photolab 8 for more than 95% of my pictures.
I just use C1 for tethering av tasks where I need the more competebt layer and masking tools in C1.
So I started to look around for an alternative to PhotoMechanic Plus just to be prepared in case I feel I will have to jump to something else. ..and I found iMatch which is made in Germany of a small company and started to rigg it to fit my needs. I was very surprised to see that it is more of a real DAM than PM Plus is. PM is still limited to just handling pictures and can also handle video in a sligtly rudimentary way. I have asked CameraBits to open for handling even Office-documents and PDF-files but so far that has not happened yet. iMatch though can handle even Office-files and PDF-files without problems. It also have face detection that works.
Now they are working on a new version that will help the users building text for Captions and Comments plus keywords with AI. It is optional of course to accept the results and they are possible to edit so it is not forced on the users.
https://www.photools.com/bin/imatch-ai-2-001.mp4The price for the software now is 129 U$ or 1477 SEK which is 27% of what a perpetual license of PM Plus will cost me now. In quite a few ways many users see iMatch as a superior DAM-software compared to PM Plus and they are extremely pleased both with the software and the pricing and the perpetual licensing model.
I have not decided yet what I will do because I can continue to use PM Plus 6 for many years without bothering to upgrade if I want. (I still use Office Pro 2007 without any problems). I have a few days ago made a testmigration with my vocabulary and all without any problems, so I see absolutely no technical problems to migrate. It also integrates perfectly with my converter DXO Photolab 8, the way I am used to even with PM Plus.
Of course I know that PM Plus have a few other important features for professional sports- and event-photographers but I and many other DXO Photolab enthusiast users have until now also been a part of your "installed base", despite that we are far more easy to move than your core user groups. Even the manufacturers of Capture One, Lightroom and Photolab have to consider a few things. The case when it concerns them is that both PhotoMechanic and iMatch are more competent than the converters and also scales far better than the converters built in picture libraries. So even of that reason the pricing of the converters can´t be set without the concern about that many users in fact do not use their built in picture libraries.
I think there will be a user reaction to these rapid increases in prices and the limitations of the user conditions that also have been changed is some cases.In the case of Capture One only the subscribers get the new feateres that gets released during the subscription year.The perpetual licence buyers only get bugfixes and maintenance. No way I will continue to subscribe for Capture One year after year with bothbthese prices and bad conditions- I will jump to a perpetual license next year after caching in a rebate of 40%. I don´t think I´m alone to do that. I will not either upgrade my PM Plus-license any more. I will continue to use PM Plus 6 as long as I can and never upgrade. I will also evaluate iMach version 2025 when it will be released before I possibly decide to migrate to iMatch instead. It is in many respects a very much more modern software, so it is not just about the pricing model. It is also about that iMatch is a much more flexible and versatile software than PM Plus.
