Hello! I built the first version of GuideGuide for Photoshop 2010. Back then it was a free plugin and managed to become the most installed third party plugin for Photoshop. Everyone loved to tweet about how free it was. Then I sold out and started charging money for it. That scared away the complainers, shaking their fists at me as they road off into the sunset on their high horses. *Why would I pay money for this*, you reasonably ask yourself. If you only use a single piece of design software, you probably shouldn't. But if you're a professional designer that uses many design tools and you need a reliable way to create grids and generate guides for adjusting objects in all of your design software, GuideGuide will be your mountain of sanity. The money from your annual license goes to finance my dream of not calling this a "side project" and will ensure I have the misplaced confidence to shoehorn it into to Figma, InDesign, and probably some more bad ideas like AfterEffects in the future.

What updates do you push that makes a subscription worthwhile?

@jmcclaire mostly it's development of new supported apps, and stability improvements to the more recent ones, which depending on your workflow and feeling toward supporting software developers, might not be a good trade for you. For the more mature plugins (PS/AI) there are a few features I have on the "nice to have" list for PS and AI should Adobe ever add APIs for them — like unique guide colors or previewing grids before applying — but since those depend on the app making changes, those sort of improvements are less frequent. I don't typically recommend people upgrade from GuideGuide 4 to 5 if they already have a license and upgrade only based on features because there isn't much difference between those versions in the older plugins. Candidly, modern design tools have fairly good grid tools, so the people that get the most out of GuideGuide are people that use a variety of tools or need to do things beyond standard grid mechanics.