How Hatch & Co Cancelled $800/year in Photo Software

The invoice arrived on a Tuesday in February, and Marcus Hatch almost missed it in his inbox. Adobe Creative Cloud: $54.99 for the month, auto-renewed. He opened the app to check the last time he'd used it. The file history said November.

Hatch is the founder of Hatch & Co., a Shopify-native kitchenware brand he built from a single cast-iron skillet listing into a 300-SKU catalog of copper cookware, ceramic serveware, and hardwood kitchen accessories. The store had grown steadily for three years. His image editing workflow had not. He'd signed up for Adobe Creative Cloud when the store launched, following advice from a Shopify subreddit thread. He'd also added a standalone upscaler tool the following year — another $200 annually — because a seller in the same thread said it was essential for sharpening supplier photos. Neither piece of software had ever been fully figured out. Both renewed automatically every year.

The gap between tools a seller owns and tools a seller actually uses is where subscription costs hide. For Hatch, it added up to $800 per year for software that covered about 20 minutes of actual weekly work: background removal on incoming product photos and the occasional crop.

The result. Marcus Hatch cancelled both subscriptions within a week of trying Playyy. He now processes an average of 15 new SKUs per month — background removal, object cleanup, and occasional AI-generated lifestyle scenes — in 8 minutes per SKU instead of 35. A lifestyle image generated with a single text prompt lifted conversion by 18% on one of his top-10 products.

The Workflow He Actually Needed

Hatch & Co.'s image problem was specific and unglamorous. Supplier photos arrived with cluttered props — a mismatched towel draped over a copper pan, a plastic tag visible in the corner of a ceramic bowl shot, a smudged countertop visible through a glass lid. Getting those images to a standard his product pages expected took background removal, a few targeted object cleanups, and an export at the right resolution.

The Adobe workflow for that sequence was functional but slow. Opening Photoshop, loading the file, using the selection tools — or relying on the auto-select results that still needed correction — saving the layer, switching to the upscaler, re-importing. On a typical delivery of 15 new SKUs, Hatch estimated he was spending close to 35 minutes per product. The tools could do more; he was only using the subset he'd taught himself through trial and error.

In March, a seller in a Shopify community Slack posted a brief recommendation — no affiliate link, just a "switched last month, haven't touched Photoshop since." Hatch opened Playyy in a browser tab that afternoon.

The first thing I noticed was that there's nothing to set up. You open the image, you tell it what you need, you export. I had a clean product shot in three minutes on the first try.

How the Workflow Changed

The new sequence Hatch runs for each incoming SKU has three steps. He opens the supplier photo directly in Playyy's Background Remover, which isolates the product automatically in under a minute. For photos with distracting props — the towel, the plastic tag, the countertop — he runs Object Remover to clean them out with a brush selection and a single click. For new SKUs going into ad creative or the store's lifestyle imagery slots, he opens the AI Image Editor and drops the cleaned cutout into a generated scene with a text prompt: warm kitchen counter, natural light, morning light, linen texture.

What he doesn't do is manage files between steps, re-import anything, or open a second application. The entire sequence runs in one browser session. Export lands directly in his downloads folder.

Time per SKU dropped from 35 minutes to 8. Across 15 new products per month, that's roughly six hours returned to him monthly from a tool switch.

In our experience working with catalog-scale Shopify sellers, the biggest drag on image workflows is rarely the editing itself — it's the software friction around each task. Every context switch between applications is a decision point where the workflow can stall. Browser-based tools that keep everything in one session consistently outperform desktop alternatives in speed, even when the underlying editing operations are comparable.

The Lifestyle Image Test

The conversion result came from curiosity, not a planned experiment. Hatch had been using white-background images in a secondary slot for one of his top-10 products — a copper-and-ceramic mortar and pestle set — because he hadn't gotten around to booking a lifestyle shoot. He used Playyy's AI Image Generator to produce a scene: the product on a marble surface, a sprig of rosemary beside it, warm ambient kitchen light. The generation took four minutes including two prompt iterations.

He swapped the secondary image on a Thursday. By the following Monday the product's conversion rate had lifted 18% against the trailing 30-day baseline. The white-background image went back to the primary slot; the lifestyle scene stayed in the secondary position where it had been tested.

According to a 2024 Baymard Institute study, 56% of online shoppers cite product images as more influential than written descriptions in purchase decisions. For a kitchenware brand where tactile quality is the primary purchase driver, lifestyle context answers the question a flat product shot cannot: what does this look like in use?

What He Cancelled and Why

The Creative Cloud subscription went first — cancelled the same week he ran his first batch of SKUs through Playyy. The upscaler followed two days later, once he confirmed that Playyy's export quality matched what the standalone tool had been producing.

The $800 was not a budget-breaking number for a store generating consistent revenue. But the cancellations carried a second value Hatch names more readily than the dollar figure: he stopped paying for tools that made him feel behind. Every time the Adobe invoice arrived, it was a small reminder that the software on his machine was more capable than the person using it. That friction is gone. The tool he reaches for now does what he needs, in the session he opens, without the gap between capability and use.

For more on building a lean product image workflow, see AI Product Photography Without a Studio.