Renewal just hit with the new January pricing sharing how I rebuilt my portrait edit around it

Renewal hit my card this week with the post-January pricing locked in. Photography plan up again, on top of the 2025 bump. For context I'm shooting 25-30 wedding/event gigs a year, mostly portraits and group stuff, and Adobe's been ~70% of my edit stack forever (LR for ingest/color/cull, PS for cleanup).

When the January bump was announced earlier this year, I started looking at where I could actually cut Adobe time without losing quality. Color/grading I'm not moving off LR, that's where my muscle memory lives.

What actually stuck was moving the skin/retouch pass out. I ran a couple of last-year galleries through Evoto for the portrait retouch step, then pulled the DNGs back into LR for final grade, and that one swap saved me roughly 4-5 hours per wedding. Not "magic" color tones still come from LR, I still sit there for the cover image and the formal group shots. But the 200-image grind through skin/blemish/flyaway? Gone.

So now my actual stack is LR → external retouch → LR final → PS only for the hero shots. I'm not eliminating Adobe (I tried, it doesn't pencil out for me yet) but the bill stings less when 1/3 of the work has moved off it.

Curious if anyone else has rebuilt around the latest hike what did you actually swap out vs. what stayed Adobe-locked? Not looking for "just switch to Capture One" takes, looking for the surgical version where you kept LR but moved specific steps.