Capture One and the “We’re Screwed” moment
For those of you who hate subscriptions for apps, I have bad news. This piece recently dropped:
The reason I bring this up is that when Adobe switched their apps to subscriptions, the Capture One people made a big deal about they being the “no subscription” alternative to Lightroom, and they’ve become fairly popular among the more serious and pro users.
You can imagine the reaction when the company announced a plan to shift to subscription pricing. Existing users are grandfathered in with their perpetual licenses, but will receive no new features or camera support. This is, effectively, what Adobe did with Lightroom 6, FWIW.
It also turns out that there have been at least two significant layoffs among the staff as well. In other words, the company that to me was the poster child for “we don’t need subscriptions to be successful” has, in fact, shown that it doesn’t work.
I feel bad for everyone who’s lost their job. While I was never a fan of Capture One (I tried it three separate times, and just found the user interface didn’t work for me), I really like seeing diversity of tools to be available. But at this point, of the major processing platforms available, only On1 offers a perpetual license, and it limits updates and support to a year. Lightroom, Luminar and now Capture One have all found that the subscription model is needed.
Capture One’s transition to subscription was unfortunately clumsy, making a bad news announcement worse:
It didn’t help that the company made the announcement not long after it concluded a 50% off sale on perpetual licenses, leaving buyers feeling as though they had been bait and switched.
This left an even bigger sour taste in the mouth of some. I understand that, but I think the reality is not that they pulled a fast one here, but that the 50% off sale was a desperate attempt to generate revenue, and when they saw the results, they realized they were at the “we’re screwed” moment. A tough call for them, and I see this more as a sign they were desperate to keep things afloat and not a money grab ahead of the change to a subscription model. I’ll cut them slack here.
I do hope they can make the product viable with the new subscription pricing. My worry is that many of their users became users because of the licensing, and will this shift cause them to abandon them? And to what? On1’s perpetual license pricing isn’t a big bargain to their subscription prices given you lose access to updates after a year. I know someone will suggest to me we should all shift to open source DarkTable, and if that’s an option for you, have fun. (hint: not for me).
It’ll be interesting to see where the Capture One product is in six months and a year. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see whether they did, in fact, turn it around. But if I was a Capture One user, I’d also be thinking and putting a bit of time into what it’d take to shift to a different tool and how I would manage that shift.
