Adobe is now on new higher pricing for the Photography Plan, and it wasn't difficult to predict that others would see that as a reason to follow.
Let's start with Adobe. The Photography Plan that includes Lightroom and Photoshop is now US$20/month, though there's currently a discount for the first six months of US$5/mo. You do get 1TB of cloud storage now, a significant increase from the old 20GB if that's important to you (it may be if you use Lightroom instead of Lightroom Classic while traveling).
You can also get a Lightroom only (all versions) plan from Adobe for US$12/month, also with 1TB of cloud storage.
Adobe users of the original plan that opted to pay annually were grandfathered for this year at the old US$10/month price, but they still only have 20GB of cloud storage.
So if you're an Adobe user, you either enrolled long term to keep your old Photography Plan price or are paying (1) 20% more but no longer have access to Photoshop or (2) double the old price, but with more cloud storage.
I know my position on this is controversial to some. Unlike some vendors, Adobe has shown that they're using the SaaS (software as a service) fees to continue to do extensive and fairly frequent feature and performance benefits. Today's Photoshop is so much better than the original Photoshop CC it's difficult to describe (and would take me a lot of writing to do justice to). So far I'm pleased with how they've treated those of us who decided to come along for the SaaS journey from the beginning. US$120 to stay at the forefront of image editing software seems reasonable to me.
I will also say this: I've been poking around my image archives and using the current Photoshop on images I took just after the turn of the century. Things like Super Resolution and the newer imaging engines, et.al., have significantly improved what I can get out of all those now 20+ year-old raw files. I think that's something that's worth a subscription: Adobe has been making my old images better.
Moving on to Capture One. The new there is two-fold: subscriptions are about to rise 6%. Billed monthly, the full (mobile and desktop) version is US$34/month, the desktop only version is US$24/month. In my mind, that's more money for less product (than Adobe) now. I didn't see a lot of feature/performance improvements that justified the high price, so much so that I dropped my subscription late last year. Your mileage may vary (Capture One is popular in studio settings and for certain cameras).
Meanwhile, Capture One has a Valentine's Day present for its user base: on February 14th the community support forum will be closed. It's unclear what motivated this decision, but it's likely an attempt to reduce costs.
Up in Oregon, On1 Photo RAW 2025.1 is on sale at US$50 for the perpetual license (though note that you'll only get the .1 minor updates, not any future major updates). They have more expensive plans that include mobile and cloud computing and major updates via subscription, but I suspect a lot of their attraction to the user base right now is the potential low one-time cost. If you're not constantly switching/upgrading cameras and are happy with the current feature set, the sale price through February 13th seems appealing.
What I've noted, though, is that many On1 Photo RAW users are essentially "subscribing." By that I mean that they buy a perpetual license and then upgrade every year when a new offer is presented. If you're in that category, On1 starts to become something more like a US$5/month option, at least at the base level. I suppose now that I'm not paying for Capture One I'll have to take another look at On1 (disclosure: I sometimes use their Effects plug-in).
I have this suspicion that we're entering a difficult period for the software companies. With camera introductions significantly down, and the fact that if you buy a high-end camera you're not likely update any time soon so don't need the "new version that understands your new raw files", I think more people are going to be looking at getting off the subscription bandwagon than on.
If, as I predict, that we're in a world now where we have maybe 6m ILC sales a year without any significant further growth, I find it difficult to believe that all the software we have today will survive for long.
