no more $15 a month

the time to leave Adobe was announced by an email from Adobe itself: “your annual subscription will renew automatically in 30 days”.

I have used Adobe Lightroom since 2013. First with a one-time purchase of Lightroom 5 and, since 2015, as a faithful monthly subscriber. The going rate is $15 a month for 1TB of cloud storage space plus Lightroom and Photoshop.

The idea of shutting down Lightroom had been considered in the last couple of years, but ultimately discarded due to the convenience that $15 a month bought: having my photo library in the cloud, accessible at will from my phone.

But that reminder email from Adobe hit a different nerve. The reflex was: this is it. I spent some time exporting all originals + edits from the cloud to my local hard drive (thank you ChatGPT for the scripts and the encouragement).

It’s as if the convenience of the service had created a different kind of burden: recurrence, account maintenance, billing, application updates, synchronization, dependency. Trivial stuff, but the repetition accumulates.

Last month I migrated this website from Ghost Pro to a static site. The impulse felt similar: Ghost Pro made publishing quite convenient, but the apparatus around it (new feature announcements, forums, themes) starts to nag.

These two moves feel plain liberating. I am taken back to the pre-internet days (even the pre hard-drive days!).

Photos and posts are files saved in my computer, no more and no less.

Of course, many services are easily worth renting forever, but it may be worth looking around.