Getting priced out of this hobby
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
...on a fixed income here as well (with rent that is about 50% of my monthly benefit cheque). Yeah not buying as much either these days unless it is already on the wishlist and goes on sale.
Haven't yet bought into G8 as G3 still suits my needs well and I already have a fair amount invested in resource content for that generation. Still not on the bus with dForce based on what I have been hearing. For using it on older hair it requires painting which I do not have a steady hand for. As pretty much all dForce clothing is G8 based, it means converting to G3 even to use with the normal rigging. I do agree don't like paying more for a feature I am not using (my work system would have trouble with dForce as well if it crashes on a 32 GB system [I only have 24 GB]).
I still kept my PC membership (did get a good deal last year which just added onto the one I had). as there are a lot of shader resources and hair content that are PC+ items and other content I like that Is DO. Pretty much more than made back what I paid for the "re-up" already and still have 8 months to go. The one thing that keeps me here and only buying at Rendo only occasionally (like for the "real" vehicles and aircraft as well as cyber world/apocalyptic sets they have) is Daz's return policy. Recently picked up one item that looked great but didn't work the way I thought it would, and was able to return it for credit with no fuss. As I dial spin my characters I don't need a lot of character content and rely more on merchant resource kits.
..Stonemason still offers both Iray and 3DL material sets (only one product the Venezia Suite doesn't)
...
Yeah, those grab bag sales can be fun and they're one of the main reasons I didn't let my Prime membership there lapse, and they did two of them this month... a lot of it turns out to be stuff that I'd never buy but can always use, like jewellery or the really weird hairstyles.
For me it's not the ever rising prices, it's more like I'm skipping current generation. I've bought less and less ever since G8 was released. I was kinda disappointed how little new it offered compared to G3, and it almost felt like Daz just had to release something new, even if they had nothing new to offer. I do not consider new default pose an improvement. Also V8 was/is not my favourite model, and since O8 was just a clone of V8, it made the decision easy to skip the entire generation. Haven't really regret that decision, since there haven't been anything new. All the "must have" products are already made for G3, so why bother purhasing them all over again for minimum gain. Increased prices for these "new" products does not ease the situation.
Daily sales are mostly G8 items, so they don't really interest me at all, and lately I don't even log in every day to see what Daz has to offer. Since I got over of my Daz addiction, I haven't even bought new Stonemason sets when they are released, and instead just wait a nice sale to get them then. That never happened when I was still actively purchasing. When it's one of the big sales, then I might check more closely, but most of the time even then, you have to buy something for G8 to get those G3 items cheaper, so no sale from me then either.
I do like my PC+ though, and I think it's still worth its cost, and I'm not planning to drop it.
Personally, I love Gen 8 male, such an improvement over the Geneis 3 male. I will never go back!
I like the patreon idea. I'd rather support specific creators such as those who make male content. And its nice to get monthly downloads....
The PC club caters to a wide variety of tastes, but rarely has items for Geneis 8 male... Its usually mostly female, fantasy, and generation 3 male content. I still think its a good value for other discounts though.
For years I have tended to try to buy my stuff in $25-35 blocks amd keep it space out to no more than once a month on average. It's just a number that feels good to me and As a married man, I just can't be explaining to my wife every few weeks why I spent another $50 on 3D content.
So typically I'd get three of even four things and together they'd be in that range. Basically I'd be picking up things that were on sale in the $8-10 range each. With base prices often now being in the range of $25 they'd have to be in the 60% off range to fit that plan. So I can either raise my per-purchase limit and be very very selective in what I buy OR just buy less, mostly in the annual sales. I've mostly done a hybrid. I make relatively few purchases now (but often above that old threshold), and then open up a bit more for the annual sales.
I only got two of the recent Grab Bag items. One was an $ 8.50 (reduced) priced cloth shader pack, that I had on my wishlist, and that came for buying a (readuced to) $ 3.50 item from my wishlist
and the second a pack with four cartoony-sexy G8F figures, which I won't use "as is" but which probably will get used for dialing them in when I start using G8F 
for which I used two more reduced wishlisted items, totalling $ 4.20. So in the end four wishlist items get for the price of one, and a spare (which was supposed to be arounf $ 8.- too).
As my budget is supposed to be drained, I'm struggling to buy another wishlist item - got some ~$ 5.- that would qualify - to have another chance... or two, which would get me two chances and bring met to the 500 pts needed for a $ 5.- voucher, which would be the chance for a third free item...
This is worse than DAZ shop Jenga for me...
I recently let my PC+ subscription end. Not because I'm mad at Daz or anything, I just can't afford it right now. I'm on a fixed income, a small gov't pension and unable to work because I care for 2 elderly parents full time.
I mostly just catch the occasional Fast Grab or Flash Sale. I'll probably save up some money and resubscribe in December to catch the winter sale and catch up on all the Petipet goodies I've been missing. So I guess my strategy is subscribe for 3 months per year and catch get the occasional sales. Daz has gotten too expensive for me. (as a sidenote: yes I bought a 1080ti because to me a piece of physical hardware is more valuable than digital content. - I'm old school)
No kidding!!! I have been lobbying for file sizes to be posted on the sales page so I can see them before buying. I still have 4 items (almost a gig each) I have bought that I haven't been able to d/l due to my crappy internet and probably never will. I don't blame Iray, I blame the tools used, namely substance painter, it creates way to many secondary textures when not used properly that really are not needed in DS and they just increase file size and drain resources
As for getting priced out, I don't see it that much since I also frequent actual CGI sites that sell to studios and such and the prices are 5-10 times what is charged here. I do realize that there is a large portion of users that are very hobby centric with less disposable income, so unless DAZ comes up with an auto process to create items and drops the PAs alltogether, there is no fiscally sound way to cut prices for those that simply can't afford to keep up. Luckily a user doesn't have to keep up with the latest and the greatest, that is totally their call and there will likely always be deep discounts on older content.
I'm a fan of the 'less than $10 rule' too. If it's more than $10, I'll probably pass on it unless it's a super useful morph kit with lots of options or something.
As for the 40% off sales on artists back catalogs, yeah that doesn't move me. 60% maybe, 70% possibly, and if it's higher than 70%, yeah then I'm looking real hard at the stuff in that sale. I'd say that 70% off fast grabs, I probably only take advantage of those maybe 5% of the time, as most of the stuff doesn't interest me.
If something falls below $5, then it's definitely on my radar, and if I can grab it for as low as 40 cents down to even 7 cents... like in the last blowout sale, well let's just say I have a lot of pre-Genesis stuff thanks to those sales. And Free...yeah free with no strings (prereqs), well who doesn't love that?
The ONLY reason I'll consider 30% off on a new item is the dynamics of a sale built around said item (i.e what killer deals can I get if I buy that item). Otherwise, unless it's real cheap, yeah not gonna move me at all. It'll show up in the back catalog eventually (with rare exceptions), and I can wait.
Along those lines, yeah there's the 'buy 5 to get 10 free sale', but that sorta kinda works out to 2/3rds off of everything if you think about it. I preferred the 'get 3-4 pro bundles for free' with the pro bunles sale (they dropped it to two in the last few sales, then went this bogo thingie route), but buy pro get 10 free is better than nothing I guess.
When picking my 10 free items in the BOGO sale, I sorted price high to low, and worked from there. 'Cuz otherwise those items were out of my comfort zone. But of course the last couple of items were mainly 'fillers' to hit the 10 item mark.
I definitely feel for you really really loyal Daz customers that already have all/almost all of the stuff offered as freebies in sales. There needs to be alternate options in that case, even if it's a lowly 'extra 10% off coupon' or something... Setting up the store to detect such instances might be a pain though. Detecting 3-4 pro bundles was possible with the early G8 pro sales, so maybe there's a simple way to add a 'counter' that checks out how many freebies are being made available to you Or not...
Also, NEVER buy Plat Club at full price if you can avoid it. It goes on sale often enough, you just have to be patient. I wish I could have grabbed it for 50% off the second time around, but 30% off was better than nothing (you see, Aiko 8 had just come out, and I had already missed out on Edward...) Not sure if 30% off Plat Club memberships in sales is the new norm, but it seems like it.
So yeah, I feel for you newer people (not that I've been there that long myself, slowly creeping up on a year and a half here). My advice to you is that you don't NEED Genesis 8, the earlier generation figures work just fine. Sales happen in the Daz store often enough, so be patient. And take advantage of the freebies out there (ShareCG, PoserDazFreebies, Rendo, HDRIHaven, etc.), just pay attention to the usage rights on those freebies when you are pondering whether to download them.
Heck, some people are STILL releasing Victoria 4/Michael 4 era stuff (mostly elsewhere) for Poser, which works pretty well in Daz. And waiting on the next killer sale is an excellent time to learn new things in Daz while you patiently wait for the next awesome sale.
The '14% cash back' (Prime) at that other store is a fairly strong motivator for me when looking at sales there... a similar thing here would be cool, but if it hasn't happened by now... just saying that it's a simple, easy way to reward regular customers. Oh, and they have end dates on all of their sales over there too. Makes pre-planning a bit easier...
That 14% reward thing helped convince me me to pull the trigger on Poser 11 recently (it was on sale). I'm now trying to learn Poser in my spare time, but in the meantime at least I can test stuff I'm making in Poser as well as Daz for compatability. Daz Studio is my go to, but it's good to broaden your horizons occasionally.
Like others in this thread, I'm hoping that we'll see more new stuff priced more reasonably in the future, but as long as enough people are willing to pay higher prices, well there's no incentive for Daz to NOT charge higher prices.
In the meantime, the prevailing advice is to take advantage of the killer sales when you can, and don't feel bad about passing on the ones that aren't floating your boat. And don't be afraid to broaden your horizons, there's lots of other stuff out in other corners of the 'net there that'll work in Daz, either out of the box or with a some fairly easy adjustments. As for stuff that is here, It'll most likey go on sale again eventually at some point, or just maybe it'll eventually become a Plat Club item...
Yeah, we should all move to a cheaper hobby, like golf or Warhammer.
hehehhe
Ha! Have you looked at country club or green's fees lately; not to mention cart rental etc. ?
Actually you might want to consider October; so you can catch the end of the PA sale as well as the PC+ sale in November and December Holiday sales.
Yeah, I've noticed at least two regular vendors here have resumed stuff at Rendo, in a manner of speaking. There's some overlap, yes, but I think it's getting to a point where the market is starting to reach a saturation point and needs more competition to stay healthy. More competition = more impetus to try creating new things to attract buyers = more money and work for everyone... idealistically speaking, anyways.
At this point, if I buy anything from the Daz store, it's mainly going to be vehicles or environments. Rendo has a great back catalog of older items that are some hidden gems, albeit you have to dig through a bunch of softcore stuff to find. HW3D is only good for their animals that AM hasn't made/doesn't plan on making, and Renderhub is slowly starting to have some pretty unique fare (like trans woman characters for G8M that are extremely well crafted).
I'd be open to supporting several PAs if they had Patreons, tbh. Not sure why some of the less prolific ones haven't thought of starting one, but eh... w/e.
But I think for me, too, it's realizing that it gets to a point where you have pretty much everything you need, and now, there's free tools out there that help make creating things a whole lot easier; or things like Marvelous Designer that have gone down in price, but once you get the hang of it, it makes back the investment made in it.
I plan to make a fortune some day by selling all the Games Workshop (or rather Citadel Miniatures) Warhammer (and just basic fantasy) metal figures I still have. Most of them are painted - and I was quite good at painting them, even sold a couple back then - and they are ancient... like... from the early 80's. Many are even from the "pre plastic bases" time.
Considering the molds for those figures were only able to be used for a limited time, before the had to be carved again - what wasn't really done that often - many of them will probably be kinda rare nowadays.
That's it. I knew it was sometime around the end of the year. I just know that if Daz doesn't get their sale started early enough, the Steam winter (or summer) sale gets my money. I've budgeted about $75/month for hobbies, whether it's games, hardware, 3d content or whatever and I have a separate bank account that makes it easy to stick to.
One good thing about not buying so much content, I'm learning to model(slowly).
$490 for a perpetual personal license and there is a note that discounts are available for owners of earlier versions: https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/product/pricing
At least Hexagon is (now) free! Blender too for that matter... both are useful for modeling.
Myself, I get a lot of use out of primitives in Daz. That may not be the 'best' way, but at least it's native. And then maybe sending something to Hexagon to chamfer the edges and fine tune the proportions to what I'm shooting for. The Geometry editor tool in Daz is a nice way to do simple things like turning a sphere into a bowl/satellite dish. I.E. Hide the unneeded polygons in your primitive, then delete them.
BTW I bought and paid for Hexagon last year. Seeing it become a free product stirs mixed feelings in me. I'm hoping that this means better Hexagon support in the future, but the fact that it's free now doesn't give Daz a lot of incentive to work on it...
I bought the Reality plugin last year, but was never able to get it to register. Daz customer support did their best, and the Reality folks made a small effort, but despite my adding the exception to my firewall, I never did see a reg code to activate it. By this time it was long past the 30 days, so I console myself that at least I bought it on sale and am out only $20 or so... I haven't bothered to try to get it working on my newer laptop becasue of this. You shouldn't NEED to have to have an online connection just to use a program. Even Daz doesn't do that.
This is also why I refuse to do the 'creative cloud' thing. Once you buy something, you should just have ownership of it, for your own use anyways.
Even though I use daz 85% of the time I still try to buy stuff i can use in my poser as well. Plus I am still using V4 and M4 & genesis pretty often trying to learn carrara and I can buy new v4 iray content at rendo once in a while. where daz has stop support v4 completely. . Anyway that where shop for new characters at rendo only because I still use the older characters formats.
But to be honest I have bough so much content over the years. I have lost the need to spend spend spend on 3d stuff. I hardly need anything newt . most of my old content can be new again by converting over to what I like or need. so new stuff has to be pretty darn special to part with $25 bucks. but if you think daz cost alot take a look at the prices at turbosquid. then you'll think daz is not so bad after all.
if anyone is interested I buy mostly props and environments now days
"If daz went to a subscription model Id drop it like a hot rock and never look back."
Haha, and I'd jump on a content subscription plan like it was covered in chocolate. I don't care in the slightest about whether I legally own the product or not, I just want access to it when I happen to need it. People who criticize the Adobe Creative Cloud plan don't think about the multiple feature updates every year, which we used to have to pay $300 for every few years before they offered subscriptions. They recently added so many Photoshop brushes as a free download that the only ones CC users will ever need again would be Ron's here at DAZ.
Everyone's different though. :)
I don't mind the subscription model for Adobe CC, though. When you take into consideration how much the programs, individually, used to cost? Being able to pick which program you want to subscribe to, carte blanche, for a certain amount each month isn't so bad in comparison. Same thing with Marvelous Designer and its subscription model, too. Hell, I think Substance Painter has a 'subscribe to own' option as well, but don't quote me on that one. The only holdout is Pictologic and ZBrush, but I would not at all be surprised if they go the subscription route in the next year or two.
If Daz were to go to a subscription route, the only way I could ever see that being justified is if they decided to merge Daz, Carrara, and Bryce into one massive program. Keep the base Daz Studio free, but a hypothetical Daz/Carrara/Bryce gestalt would probably cost a pretty penny.
Also, the Kyle T. Webster brushes are amazing. Funny thing, I dragged my feet on buying them for years: I don't actually draw in PS anymore (too much of a hassle and not as intuitive; I only ever use it for postwork), so I wasn't sure if I could justify buying them. Then, no joke, the day after I had resolved to purchase one brush pack... I went to buy one, and then learned they were being made free for Adobe CC subscribers, because Kyle joined Adobe and they bought the rights to his brushes.
I paid $499 I think when I grabbed Photoshop 7 (CS had just come out, hence the price drop from $609), back in 2003. Lessee... at this point my cost of ownership is down to about $33 per year and dropping, and it works quite wellon 64 bit laptop with Windows 10, as well as previously on my older 32 bit systems.
Sure, I don't have all of the latest bells and whistles, but PS7 still kicks ass, even today. I tried Gimp a couple of years back, but it didn't have many of the features I regularly use in PS (layer styles for example, at least not that I could figure out), and it was a bit more non-intuitive as well, so I went right back to using Photoshop 7.
Of course, if I was a cutting edge graphic artist, THEN maybe the CC would be appealing to me, but I've heard a few horror stories now about people having billing issues which resulted in their CC getting deactivated, and then spending the next week or so dealing with Adobe CS trying to fix/reactivate it. And if you can't afford it that month... well good luck with that.
This is no doubt why we have so many Gimp users around here these days.
Yeah, I paid $800 for a full version of Photoshop about a year before we learned about the plans for Creative Cloud because I was using one too old to upgrade from at the time. For me, $9 a month now is a steal. As for a DAZ subscription, I was referring to the content being available through a subscription, not the programs themselves, but DAZ has already said that won't happen because of PAs making the majority of the content, etc.
There are so many Kyle brushes, yep! I don't think I could even get around to even testing them all out. Kinda surprising that Adobe hasn't developed (or bought out) a true 3D renderer by now to join their collection too though.
Photoline is what has my attention at the moment. It's essentially a combination of Photoshop and Freehand. A few of the Freehand forum peeps really love this program.
https://www.pl32.com/
It's a EU thing though, which is one reason why I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Oh, and Adobe, Free Freehand! No I don't mean free as in no cost, I mean free as in Adobe essentially killed off Freehand after acquiring it from Macromedia, so it is in license squatter limbo, with no support for loyal Freehand users that have had to resort to other alternatives. Illustrator isn't quite the same thing...
I'd still be using Pagemaker and Freehand today if I had PC versions.
OMG...Pagemaker was god-awful...lol (those damn window shades - I'm a Quark girl...loved Mulit-Ad Creator too). Freehand was great tho. I liked it a lot better than I ever liked Illustrator ;)
Laurie