Freelance photo workflow router that matches edits to tools you already own

The moment it becomes a real problem: a freelance photographer or small studio needs to do a batch of wedding exports, some portrait retouching, and one panorama stitch — but the tools they've licensed between Lightroom Classic, Affinity Photo, and one or two free apps don't fully overlap. They waste time discovering mid-task that a specific feature (say, AI background removal or HDR merge) is locked in the version they have, or requires an upgrade they haven't budgeted for. They're not looking for one tool that does everything — they're trying to extract maximum value from what they've already paid for.

This gap persists because each vendor has every incentive to show you everything their product can do — including the locked parts — and no incentive to tell you which of your other licenses already covers a capability you're about to pay to unlock. The information about what each license tier actually covers, per task type, lives in documentation scattered across vendor sites and is never cross-referenced.

The specific complaint — 'it is a bit difficult to distinguish between the features available with and without licenses, since they are all together in the app' — describes the problem at the single-tool level. Multiply that by four tools and the confusion compounds. Users are paying for overlapping capabilities or upgrading unnecessarily because there's no way to see across their own stack.

This is a business because the need recurs every time a new project type comes in, every time a subscription renews, and every time a new tool is evaluated. The alternative — manually reading changelog pages and feature comparison tables across four vendor sites — costs a freelancer 30–60 minutes per decision. For a studio doing this quarterly, that's real money, and the wrong decision (buying a tier they didn't need, or missing a capability they already licensed) compounds.

What to build

Build a desktop app where a photographer inputs the licenses and subscription tiers they currently hold across up to ten photo editing tools, and the app maps each editing task type (background removal, RAW export, AI upscaling, batch rename, etc.) to which of their existing licenses already covers it — surfacing gaps only when no owned license handles the task.

Where to start

Start with Lightroom Classic and Affinity Photo users specifically — they're the most likely to be running both simultaneously precisely because they're trying to avoid paying for Adobe's full Creative Cloud, and the overlap between those two tools is well-documented enough to build the first comparison table accurately.

The hard part

License tier feature data is not exposed via API by any vendor — you'd have to manually maintain a database of what each version of each tool supports, which is brittle and labor-intensive as vendors update tiers constantly.

How it makes money

One-time purchase of $29–49 for the desktop app, with an annual $12 update subscription for keeping the license feature database current as vendors change tiers.