Just wanted to provide some feedback from a current non-subscriber, and why I don’t see that situation changing as it stands.
I have two current subscriptions to Paizo (Lost Omens and Rulebooks respectively). I don’t have all of the Lost Omens books (I started my sub a bit later than the rulebooks), but I have a lot of them.
The cost of the Ultimate Bundle, even after my Paizo discounts, is well over $1000. This is for content I largely already own, in both digital and physical format.
While I like the look of your site and service, I just can’t justify paying this amount of money just to re-unlock the material I already own. Compounding the issue, I own Foundry VTT and all of the PF2e game rules are available there for free, without me needing to pay extra for them.
I’m sure I can’t be the only PF2e GM who already owns a metric boatload of material already and has an enormous barrier to entry as a result. I’d be happy to pay a monthly subscription to use what I already have, but as it stands I just can’t see any way this platform is going to work for me. The cost to unlock everything on top of what I’ve already paid is just far too high to justify, and that’s a shame since it looks like a great service.
I’ll keep an eye out in case things change in the future, but as it is I simply can’t justify what it would cost me.
Best of luck with development - we need more products like these in the hobby!
While not being at the price of investment that you are, I felt very similarly with the D&D books situation - I find it very annoying that you can’t find a way to prove that you own the hardcopy of something in order to gain digital access to it. On the other hand, I understand on a practical level that implimenting a system like that is arduous at best, and not something that they can retroactively do with old books that are already out there and now there’s digital content for it.
I don’t really have any great suggestions to add, I just wanted to chime in and say I agree with you in terms of being unwilling to double-pay for things. It’s why I don’t have access to a lot of the books over on D&D beyond - I bought those books in person at my local comic book shop because the owner and his son are good friends and I like to support their store, but I’m not going to double-buy something.
It’s probably very unrealistic but if Paizo / Demiplane could figure out some kind of system, even a human moderation team where you submit photos of your books and they review it and individually authorize that content or something - maybe they could even set up a way for the community to do it so that the cost isn’t on their shoulders, like a few trusted community moderators that handle it I don’t know - it would win a lot of brownie points I think. Not that they really need to do anything to win them right now, but it would be a very nice gesture. Probably sort of unrealistic though, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen much these days, human moderators and whatnot. If it can’t be automated it doesn’t seem worth doing, which is sort of unfortunate but it’s the way everything seems to be going so I don’t want to have unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved y’know!