Google announced that a set of 7 plugins for wode range of photo editing tasks is now available for free (get it here).
PetaPixel recaps history of Nik Software:
You may remember that Google acquired Nik Software and its popular Snapseed photo editing app back in September 2012. Although Google killed off Snapseed for Desktop in March 2013, it was still big news when Google started selling the entire Nik suite (originally valued at around $500) for the “low price” of $150 later that month.
Now it’s free.
Nik Software was founded in 1995 and now a decade of depelopers' effort and creativity is avaialbe for free. That's something hard to compete against.