Tom, Many of the professionals who use Poser are not posting in the galleries because they may not own the rights to their images (this is the first year in the last fifteen where I have done a piece of art for myself) or because they do animations and holograms and other fun imagery which just doesn't cram well into the gallery byte limits. A couple hundred bucks for a program is dirt cheap. I spent $3000 on 3DStudio version 2 a decade ago and was exceedingly glad to dispose of it. I would have needed to spend another $5000 or so on plugins to get it to do what it should have done out of the box, IF it had worked. And that was cheap compared to what Alias was charging for the predecessor to Maya. (I was looking at $40K for hardware and software to start with and couldn't justify spending half a year's income.) I will recommend that you get enough memory (at least a half gig of RAM) to run your software, especially once you start loading down a scene with higher polycount models and large textures. Poser will throw up odd error messages if it doesn't have enough memory. That is the only additional purchase I'd recommend until you get used to the software and see what you want to do with it. Then you can buy software for modeling, texturing, landscapes and lighting and lots of figures and props... whatever you need or need to do. There are some sites with weekly free items and sites with newsletters with free items. Many of these items will enter the stores later, but many will disappear into pixel dust. I'd suggest signing up and checking out DAZ, RDNA, 3dCommune, the newsletter here, among others. You don't have to download everything you see, but you might want to have that choice when something special comes up. The only subscription I have is Traveler's Props Club and I can't recommend it highly enough for quality and variety. Other folks have joined Poserworld and PropsGuild, both with vast archives of stuff. So as to your original questions... the cost is more in time than money, especially if you are a professional and noodle it until it is right. :) Carolly