Subscription minimizing

I'm feeling more repelled from software subscriptions recently, primarily for products that have their own proprietary data storage or formats. Partly it's the lock-in effect, and also the platform decay that is accelerating as all companies (besides major AI labs) get nervous about their margins and sustainability.

Anyway, so far:

• From Fantastical to BusyCal. They're both proprietary mac-assed Mac apps. I can't find an open-source alternative with enough polish & maintainership. BusyCal is a version-based permanent license, $50, versus Fantastical which is $57/year. The version-based restriction is a gamble: maybe there'll be some big feature they ship or macOS change that necessitates upgrading, maybe there won't be. I've been surprised at how little I care that I'm using an old version of DevonThink with a perpetual license.
• From Feedbin to NetNewsWire. Also a mac-assed Mac app, and lovingly maintained by Brent Simmons, who's now retired and works on it semi-full-time. It's solid. Having switched, I'm not sure why I needed my RSS reader to be a web application in the first place. NetNewsWire is an open source application, but you wouldn't know from using it. It looks good!
• From Instapaper to Readeck. This is the one I have the most feelings about, being a years-long Instapaper fan. Both it and Feedbin aren't evil corporations but relatively small, friendly indie companies. But without full-text export, I'm building a proprietary dataset in Instapaper which I don't want to. And I'm pretty disappointed that Instapaper's Kobo integration, the reason why I bought a Kobo Calibre Color, never got the basic ability to highlight articles. They rolled out Boox Palma integration a few days ago and it looks like that supports highlighting. I like the idea of contributing to Readeck and the Readeck Kobo plugin supports highlighting and works pretty well, so I'm excited about the possibility there. And readeck of course supports full-text export. So far this is in no way a cost-savings: the Hetzner server I use to host Readeck will cost around $22 a month. I'll either downgrade it, host something else on it to make it worthwhile, or live with the tiny cost increase. Maybe this is a good opportunity to host a Tranquil PDS to make my Bluesky identity independent.

TODO

Still, my most expensive subscription is the hardest to cut: Capture One has been my go-to for organizing and light retouching of photos and drawings. It's great, but expensive and likely to get more so as it gets revenue-maximized and sold from one private equity firm to another. I've tried digiKam but it's ugly and the learning curve is steep. Aphera looks amazing but is much more focused on raw editing than organization and lacks any kind of retouching tools. I could return to Lightroom but I dread Adobe products. DaVinci Resolve Photo could be the answer, but there's no support for Olympus raw yet. I could even use Apple Photos, but I don't think Olympus raw is supported there either. What I'm really looking for is more of a smooth, capable 'digital asset manager' that's good for managing images. The hunt continues. Maybe buying a perpetual license to Capture One is the answer, but the break-even with my pricing would be at two years.