For what its worth (?!) I generally don’t like unbounded costs and I also try and get value for money. I prefer to know that if my circumstances take a financial down turn that I will be able to continue processing my images using software that I own a licence for.
The OP asks about Capture One and I decided that they did not offer value for money as I was being asked to pay for a DAM system that did not work. Worse I could not get Capture One (v19/v20) to work very well with external DAMs (but that might be me). So I would not consider renting Capture One in the hope that they employ a database designer.
Before Capture One I used Lightroom which I was happy to use until I discovered that while I had purchased a 64 bit version the installer was 32 bit so would not load LR on my new 64 bit only OS. Adobe’s response was “join our subscription service”. I ran a trial and was dismayed at the amount of “helpers” that Adobe required installed alongside subscription version of Lightroom. These caused instability so at the end of the trial I removed all Adobe products except for their free PDF reader.
I find it curious that Affinity are able to offer an upgrade to all their applications for less than ninety pounds whereas many other corporate software houses require well over a hundred and possibly hundreds of pounds to upgrade very similar software.
I have no idea of how many members of staff that either companies employ but Serif has three directors and I would guess that Adobe has a “few” more ;-). I would guess that Adobe has a larger number of sales/users.
I like the idea of supporting small efficient software houses that produce decent applications especially when they are only an hours drive away.
For the moment anyway, Serif don’t rely on people upgrading every year so they don’t need dramatic improvements every year. When their market is saturated they may need to change but they seem to be recruiting enough new users to keep going.
Serif is moving into corporate volume licens area where the cost of Adobe subscriptions are too high to bare. And they did offer both both a subscription model as well as a perpetual one. This was before version 2 release.
When Serif released V2 recently, Ash Hewson said “But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.”
There was quite a backlash when they surveyed users about moving to a subscription model.
The problem they’re having with V2 is people who recently purchased V1 but they seem to be smoothing that over.
