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Comment by bluish29 | Hacker News Reader

This looks interesting, but as someone working in academia, I find the pricing for individuals not realistic. 35$ per month (if paid annually) is too much for a tool that would be usually be used a couple of times per year. You don't design a poster each month. I think a better pricing model would be per usage. Even the subscription price of ~40$ (if paid monthly)is too much for a poster or two.

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Agreed on the pricing, and IMO nothing can compare to a real vector graphics editor for posters (either Illustrator or Inkscape). How would you standardize fonts in figures or do true alignments with this tool (or PPT)?

BioRender is cool for premade vector images, but their license (and cost) is still too prohibitive for that, especially for grad students. Bioicons (https://bioicons.com) is a nice FOSS alternative.

The price is quite insane, and a subscription is not really a good fit for something you do not that often. Making posters is not a core activity for scientists, and while Powerpoint is really not a good tool it actually works well enough for the purpose.

Edit: Looking closer the title is deceiving, making posters seems like a new feature, but not the core purpose. Making figures seems to be the main purpose of this product, and that is a lot closer to a core activity for scientists than posters are. Still very expensive, but I could see a lab buying a license or two, mostly for the large library of icons/components.

Yep, a 5-seat personal Office 365 license is $100/year, and academia loves Google's online counterparts which are totally free. My wife who's a PhD also gets a free Adobe CS institute-wide. Very hard to compete with all that.

Overall, when I was doing a data model chart for my current company, I researched good options for doing that in a collaborative manner, and all of them are subscription-based now, which doesn't make sense for making a diagram or two when draw.io is available.

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