@Wlodek It might be interesting to take out a months subscription and then submit any and all issues with PL9 to see the reaction.
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Or all the old outstanding issues
Incidentally, from the sales page itself:
…DxO Premium Support tickets are handled ahead of standard requests.
Guess that answers that question.
Those of us not willing to pay for a support subscription can expect reduced/de-prioritised customer support.
That’s awful customer service.
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‘can expect’ => ‘is’.
Sounds like propaganda logic 
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Well, when you consider. “normal” service can take several days already, I do wonder how long that would end up with a lesser priority 
Although I do wonder how the “priority” staff will fill their time when there are no priority requests.
Day-by-day it’s none of my business (provided I don’t need support and am getting on with, y’know, living my life 
)
But I do wonder how they’ve structured the team. Is there even a separate support team for premium members, or is it all the same support team but they’ll drop everything for any premium issue?
Given “Premium tickets… are handled ahead of standard” I’m guessing that is the case and it’s all one team working with the most urgent (paid) tickets first and foremost.
If everything works as it’s supposed to, I could put this issue in the same unimportant category as “how well my ISP provides support”. I don’t need it, so who cares? But with recent performance and masking issues, how they’re dealing with issues suddenly is a concern after all.
I’m really not bothered by this. When I’ve needed support, the team has consistently responded within 24–72 hours, and if my issue can be solved, it usually is.
If others want to pay for faster service, that’s fair enough.
With the recent price adjustments and the move to separate things that used to be bundled together, it feels like a natural evolution — a small, boutique team doing what they can to stay competitive and afloat. I get that. I don’t necessarily love it, but I understand it. At some point, though, my own budget for supporting them might not stretch as far as they need.
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That’s my concern also. The products already aren’t cheap, especially for those of us who “choose” to stay up to date with latest upgrades.
I do appreciate they’re a smaller team than e.g. Adobe, but so am I.
Are established customers to see slightly reduced support… slightly higher prices… slightly more segregated features so we need to buy more things… year on year?
Most of us regulars are no doubt here because we enjoy using the products on some level and they’re useful to us. Frankly, it’ll be stressful trying to get set up with a replacement if it comes to that, but we’re not golden geese either.
Yeah, and the squeeze is there. For them, for us. And I enjoy their products. I think it’s imperative that competition remains strong and healthy. We’ve seen what happens with consolidation and “silos” in an industry across all sectors.
I’m gonna say this, and I will probably take some flak. But DxO already seems to struggle with messaging and getting their name out. I rarely encounter them in the wild. And when potential customers come to the forums, casual observers see a lot of negative talk.
The won’t bother to dig deeper and see for the most part, IMHO, it’s a passionate and demanding community that desires and tries to help be part of finding solutions to problems. It also holds the team accountable. They aren’t required to look below the surface though. And many/most won’t and will just move on.
I’m not advocating fanboy culture. Or that people should ignore problems. And fwiw, I don’t think most DxO customers are “filthy casuals” if I can borrow a gaming term. But that makes us as niche as the products.
So, I wish I knew how to help, or had a “magic” solution. But the average Adobe, Luminar, On1, Topaz user isn’t our tribe. And I still really only have one-foot in the village myself. So I should probably put the microphone down now. 
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Microphone away, I can’t be the only one with a “gob” 
In short: I agree entirely.
Longer:
Competition is absolutely important but that’s only possible if the options remain competitive.
If DxO fancies going the way of Adobe… charging more, offering less (unless you pay)… is that still competitive?
As good as the PhotoLab product is, looking around the forum here it’s clearly not perfect and the problems aren’t a mildly irritating missing feature, but performance and stability issues. Not good if you rely on it for your career, for example.
As you say, if potential customers do come here they’re going to get the worst impression. They won’t even see the photos I’ve lovingly created with PhotoLab, just me moaning. DxO aren’t here doing damage control - we were left to speculate and beta test and fault-find for ourselves.
I consider myself a fanboy, insomuch as I waste a lot of time here talking, in the vague hope it’ll lead to improvement. I could just sign up to Adobe, take my 20GB free cloud storage and my mobile app and programs that work faster - but I think PhotoLab can potentially do a better quality job.
Looking around… it’s not just me complaining and I don’t entirely like what I see of DxO monetising support, not communicating regarding feature-breaking issues and so on. I hope they get the message.
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Well said.
We’ll see and I hope so.
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“Premium Support” reminds me of when the Post Office in the UK introduced ‘First Class Post’ - for an extra cost things would be delivered the next working day. Someone commented "Ah yes, I understand, It’s the same as what we used to call ‘Post’ "
My point is that if a product, that has no moving parts, requires support - then it should have reliable support, end of story.
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Sounds about right. Charging extra to monetise fixing your digital product faster is not a good look.
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Pretty much everyone offers a higher tier of support, premium or priority support for professionals and businesses.
CaptureOne, Adobe, ON1, Affinity (Business), Corel, et al.
I don’t see DxO’s path into this as anything strange or bad. Quite the opposite. It means that they are adapting and embracing a professional customer sector and with that there will be benefits for all us that do not pay for a premium.
As we will have the ability to ride on their payments and see a more active development and shorter time between builds and updates - as the premium paying customers will demand that.
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These changes may also have the following effects
- DXO will be able to identify users who require rapid support of this level. These users will be given priority.
- On this basis, change requests and change implementation will also be given higher priority.
- The further development of the software will be more strongly influenced by these users.
I assume that the existing first-level support will remain in place and that additional support staff will have to take on these new tasks. They must guarantee a fast and efficient connection between the customer and development. A separate support group will be formed in development. This is my experience from other companies.
This also means that, for us as normal customers, support will initially feel worse. Because the necessary changes for paid support must be implemented quickly and effectively, it is to be expected that the overall quality will increase in the long term, even for us, otherwise paid support will also come to nothing.
In this respect, a difficult period lies ahead, but one that can lead to more stable software.
I can’t shake the feeling that if (DxO staff) stopped by this forum, they could very quickly see some of the most urgent performance issues and bugs, followed by feature requests.
I’m not saying every little idea or comment we come up with here should become development dogma for them, but it’s a start.
They do review this site. They just don’t comment on it.
Mark
If that’s the case, they seldom seem to act on it either (and here I don’t mean implementing any feature idea we have, but rather providing support and reassurance throughout this whole AI masking debacle).
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The new support is as good as ever, after 3 emails telling me of the new video driver and that the problem was nothing to do with them for a totally unrelated support ticket.I got an email to rate how good the support was, but it will not accept anything as they say its now closed the ticket as solved.
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So, does it mean that photographers paying extra will get a chance to see the bugs they noticed recognised, and maybe addressed, when the toothless vilains who only paid full price will be ignored in a superb way ?
After conditioning the use of luminosity masks, which is a core feature, with purchase of the unrelated filmpack, addon, did DxO Marketing geniuses find yet another new way to milk users ?
Too bad they didn’t rely on DxO’s recognised strength, which was it’s unparalleled denoising expertise instead of jumping to some shady marketing tactics.
Lightroom is getting very close on noise reduction, and ‘permanent’ purchase but with unfair upgrade policies and dirty tactics vs subscription isn’t a clear point for DxO
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