Hmm, I received an invitation email from ON1 today. It was for a "secret" early bird upgrade to the 2023 version of ON1 PR. I clicked on the link and a page opened, which told how exciting the upgrade would be and how I was getting the invite because I was a 2022 license holder. When I clicked on the "Order Now" button, I realized why the previous page said the changes were "mind blowing." The upgrade price has jumped "for this mind blowing good" deal to $150 (marked down from $230) and the subscription priced was $150 (down from $180). I've upgraded the last 3 years in a row since buying it in 2018. I think that's it.

Follow-up - I just read on Facebook and I didn't notice this before but the $150 includes all the plugins that are normally sold separately, like resize AI, denoise AI, etc. My immediate thought was what percentage of users have the main program and also use the separate/standalone plugins?

It's up to you. All editing programs work great on JPEGs. The from-camera JPEGs have all the same pixels as the RAW files. But, the details that describe each of those pixels have been compressed into an 8-bit format, down from typically 12-bit. The further you need to edit the image, especially in the modification to the color tones (making the image much brighter or radically adjusting the white balance), here you're more likely to encounter issues in 'how far' you can adjust before running into problems due to the less data (bit-depth) of the image file.

If you're just going to press <auto> in your editor on the RAW file and call it done, how different is that edit processing than using the camera JPEGs? That same <auto> as you might be doing to your JPEGs too.

When you become a RAW photographer, you become the decision maker for these considerations in post processing, where many had been decided by the camera for the JPEG:

1. Sharpening
2. Noise Reduction
3. Color Saturation
4. Exposure adjustments, general
5. Contrast, general
6. Highlights and shadows
7. White Balance
8. Lens corrections
9. Color space
10. Pixel resolution for target image share platforms
11. Disk storage (for the larger files)
12. Image file back-up strategy (for those larger files)

You don't have to understand all these issues, but when you do, you'll be much more successful as a RAW photographer.

Personally, I think shooting JPEG+RAW is a waste of time and space. You don't get better at shooting and editing either image format, while the two versions of every image creates both version control management issues and excessive storage needs. If you work only with one file type, you can get a lot better at being successful with that file type, understanding deeply the limits and the opportunities of that format.