Online Subscription or Downloadable Purchase
 

I've searched through the forums a bit this morning and haven't found anything official or explicit on this - I do apologize if this is a duplicate and would love to be directed to the answer, if I missed it.

I have made a significant investment in Hero Lab throughout Pathfinder 1E and expect to get a couple more years usage out of it at least.

But I also totally understand the advantages of moving to a cloud-based subscription model. I would gladly pay (maybe $5 per month?) for access to HLO for PF2 and would be even more delighted if PF1 was brought over to this new platform. (I love the Campaign Manager hints, too!)

The deal-breaker for me would be a model that combines both methods - purchase it, subscribe to it and then purchase additional content as books and such are released which kind of looks like where Starfinder is going.

Again, I haven't used HLO and would love to have someone correct me and allay my fears of a cash grab. Has anything official been said to address this?

If you have lots in HLC, there is a one-off payment to also have access to that information in HLO (when it becomes available).

You have to buy everything again for PF2, since it isn't the same as PF1.

The HLO subscription is purely for access to the tool and your characters. The specific rules and packages you want access to within HLO will need a purchase of each one.

So the purchasing of the stuff is the same as you have been doing with PF1, but with an additional annual server charge.

Wait a sec - are you saying that I have to _buy_ the packages as they are released but I can only use them if I pay an _additional_ access fee?!?

That's right. The access fee pays to run the servers, but otherwise it works the same way as Classic.
(It is fair to say that this business model has not been met with universal acclaim.)

The actual server fee for the year isn't that much.

Funny story, my Yahoo Email account just went up to 39.99 a year for a service that no longer supports Outlook and has discontinued the Yahoo apps that would be able to retrieve Email for you. One has to use the AOL web portal thing, though Windows basic email program in Win10 is working for the moment.

So 24.95 a year is pretty cheap.

This.

Maybe that should be a marketing line: "For less than seven cents a day!"

The server access fee is quite reasonable.

And a lot of the advertised options of HL Online were rather neat.
Our group is looking forward to having one person cast a party buff, and having it hit the entire group without needing to enable an adjustment on each character.

With Realm Works able to point to a URL of a character, not just the static saved portfolio, integrating a monster or character into an active portfolio should be even better.
And having a VTT able to grab the current version of a character, means not needing to edit the VTT version, every time there's a change to the HL version of the character.

That said, while I have an interest in Starfinder, my players don't.
And none of us have any interest in Pathfinder 2e (not saying there aren't plenty of others who might).
For our group, we'll gladly jump to HLO, once Pathfinder 1e (with 3pp HL file support such as the Community Pack, Legendary Mythic stuff, Drop Dead Studio's Sphere files etc) are supported on HLO.

For me, the extra stuff for Online would only matter if my GM would be using it in a Wi Fi enabled place we are playing at. Otherwise, it isn't gonna make much difference on my printed character sheet.

I just want a character builder aid for the game, not an online swiss army knife with Gensu blades.

There you go, I fixed that for you. :)

Meh. MapTool can do that right now and has had this capability going back... five or six years?

Meh. Jamz (heavy HL user and big MT contributor) added portfolio support to MapTool. Just navigate to the folder containing the portfolio then drag/drop onto the map. It imports the portrait image and the stats. Pretty tough to beat.

And that said, it's extensible because the various components are not controlled by a for-profit company but by the community and the maintainers of the open source code. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the latter.)

Not enough value for me. And I'll look at the official PF2E when it's out, but I've got a lot invested in 1E so I'm not in any hurry. I do have to decide whether I'm going to cancel my Paizo AP subscription, though. I've been a subscriber since AP#1...