As I wrote yesterday, I wanted to explain a little more about why Lumen Tool now has a paid version.
It is something I thought about for quite a while, mostly because Lumen Tool never started as a commercial project.
When I first began building it in early 2026, it was simply something that seemed fun to make. There was no business plan behind it and I wasn’t thinking about whether I could eventually make money from it.
I did, however, immediately spend far too much time on it.
One of my problems is that I’m rarely completely satisfied with something I’ve made. There is always another thing I want to improve, another feature I want to add or some part of the interface I think could work or look better. So even the original version already took a considerable amount of time to build.
That was fine. I enjoyed doing it.
After that, I moved almost completely onto a much larger project called Wedding Desk. It quickly became clear that a project of that size could only really work as a commercial product. It has taken up most of my development time for the past four or five months.
Now that Wedding Desk is in beta and I have reached a point where I can take my foot off the accelerator a little, I decided to pick up Lumen Tool again.
Why charging became necessary
This time I also had to ask myself a fairly simple question:
How far can I realistically continue building this without charging for it?
And the answer came pretty quickly.
If I want to keep developing Lumen Tool seriously, I have to charge something for it.
There really isn’t a more complicated reason behind it.
I love seeing people use the tool. The comments and messages I get through Reddit, email and elsewhere are enormously appreciated. The people who have bought me a coffee through Buy Me a Coffee have been amazing as well, and all of that has absolutely been part of the motivation to keep working on it.
But even what looks like a small change can easily take several hours to design, build, test and fix.
And with Lumen Tool Studio I’m moving beyond small changes.
The plan now is to regularly add completely new modules, like the Reference Lab I introduced yesterday. Those modules can easily take days, weeks or eventually much longer to build.
There is really only one way I can justify spending that amount of time on it: it has to become a paid product.
Hopefully that works out well for both sides. It gives me the freedom to keep developing Lumen Tool and push it much further than I could justify doing as a free side project, while Studio users get a tool that continues to grow.
The free version stays free
The original, simpler version of Lumen Tool is not going anywhere.
It stays free.
One head, one fully usable Key Light and the basic lighting controls. I can see from the statistics that a lot of people use it, so I hope it continues to be useful for anyone who doesn’t need or want Studio.
What I don’t expect to do is keep actively expanding that version. It has reached the point where, for me, it does what it is supposed to do.
New development will mostly happen inside Lumen Tool Studio.
Why Studio costs $9 per month
I have currently set Studio at $9 per month.
For software like this, that is about as low as I think it makes sense to go.
There are transaction costs, currency conversion costs for me as a European seller, taxes and eventually server and infrastructure costs as Studio grows. Once all of that is taken into account, going significantly below $9 starts to make very little sense.
And to be completely transparent, if Studio develops into the larger professional software package I have in mind, with more and more modules added over time, I expect the price will eventually increase.
But my intention isn’t to squeeze as much money as possible out of every user.
The important thing for me is that someone paying for Studio should be able to look at what they are getting and think:
Yes, this is worth what I’m paying for it.
That’s basically the deal I want to make.
I also completely understand that there will be people who think tools like this should simply be free.
Part of me agrees.
Unfortunately, my time isn’t free. Every day I spend developing Lumen Tool is a day I can’t spend on work that does pay me.
That is the trade-off.
Studio pays for continued development
So that’s really all there is to it.
The free Lumen Tool stays free. Studio pays for continued development. And hopefully that gives me the freedom to build some very interesting things over the coming months.