That’s not going to work, because the natures of the different surface will make a given RGB/CMYK perceptually differ.
Think display calibration, except a lot worse.
The point of the Pantone system is that they’ve done the legwork to get perceptual matchings across surfaces, and design paint mix recipes to achieve reproducible matching. That’s what you’re paying for.
Let's say I want to print something in Pantone 123 (careful, Fluke might go after me!) I send over a design artifact that uses the color #ffc72b. Now, when it comes time for printing, the printer can't print RGB, but I also specify the mapping "#ffc72b is actually Pantone 123".
The printer _uses Pantone 123_. We don't suffer any loss of color fidelity. We only use RGB/CMYK as stand-ins for the correct color.
Note there are millions (24-bit) or billions (32-bit, but I mean, you can use however many bits you want) of RGB/CMYKs and only thousands of Pantones. This mapping doesn't need to be lossy.
Yes, yes, yes, #ffc72b is not Pantone 123. But it _is_ if I say "map everything to the closest Pantone color."
Considering the part that quotes the original post is missing the whole "Pantone colour" bit, I feel like the post was edited afterwards.
You could of course not subscribe and communicate that manually, but I bet that’s frustrating if you’re an agency working on many brands not a in-house team.
$15 a month is a heavy subscription for the convenience though.
That's exactly what I said above. It's nothing more than a label with a mapping. The actual matching to whatever is defined by Pantone happens during printing/manufacturing, not in Photoshop.
However, for Photoshop specifically, the only use of that information is to display an RGB approximation.
(although with uncalibrated printer you'd be screwed one way or another, I guess)
