Gotta love the "I'll just remember it" crowd.

Yo @kai779, did you find the learning curve worth it in the long run?

Man, that's rough... I started charging a rush fee after a similar thing happened to me. It doesn't have to be huge but just enough to make them think twice before pulling that stunt. Now I ask for half up front on any urgent job too, weeds out the time wasters pretty quick.

Yeah that's rough, the pricing is crazy now. I went through the same thing last year when I was working on a rebrand for a small cafe chain and realized my old Pantone deck was basically useless. What I ended up doing was just using CMYK approximations from the web and honestly it's been fine for most projects. Unless you're doing something super specific like packaging for a global brand where color matching is critical, the approximations are more than good enough. I pulled up a free CMYK conversion chart online and saved a bookmark, saved me a ton of money. The only time I had to break down and buy a physical chip was for a client who insisted on exact spot colors for their merch, but that was like one time in three years. So yeah, ditch the subscription and save the cash.

Hah, yeah. I used to pile on shadows like crazy until someone told me to stop.