Hey guys, my hubby is looking into getting Photoshop.
Looking at Adobe website, Photoshop as a single app costs $358 per year. But if he gets the Photography plan that includes Photoshop (plus other stuff he can ignore), it’s only $179 per year. Is that correct? If so, why would anyone go for the single app?
It’s probably so they can say sales of Lightroom are up …
Adobe’s pricing structure is insane. If you look through the different offering panes, sometimes the same package will be different prices.
Either they can’t do math, or they think YOU won’t.
One thing for certain, the price goes up for all of us this year.
I can’t get out of this industry fast enough.
Right; Adobe doesn’t want to peddle single-app subscriptions because that model, proliferated, would fail in the long term. Better to offer “incentive” for multiple-app licensing to foster deepened workflow dependency and ingrain more products in the realm of perceived must-have. Over time, multi-app licenses will become less and less the relative bargain. Simple marketing strategy, really.
While we’re at it, at the risk of being tagged an Adobe cheerleader, I do find it interesting how Adobe has been vilified for changing to the subscription model; the way many other industry-standard players (in other industries) did more than a decade prior. A lot of enterprise-scale Engineering, Accounting, and other softwares have been licensed via subscription long enough that it’s been accepted as normal for quite some time. Adobe didn’t dream this up just to screw you, me, and the Communications community that comprises most of its market. Just like those other industries, another 10 years or so down the road, the mantle will have been passed to enough designers who never heard of a “perpetual” license that the “holding my files hostage” cries will be quieted, and the subscription(s) will be chalked up to routine cost-of-doing-business. We do live in a Capitalist society, and every company in the game has to grow to survive, including your own. Resistance to change is a losing strategy.
I think the subscription model you refer to was called a Dongle.
And yer right, the software had limited functionality without that key. Sign software has been that way for as long as I’ve been doing this. In fact, Signlab still requires a USB key to operate.
Maybe they charge an extra 30 a month for the additional 80GB of cloud storage
I agree. Selling software isn’t like selling physical things where every individual item costs money to make. With software, once the expense of developing and coding it is finished, selling as many copies of that software in whatever combinations seem appropriate comes with no additional manufacturing cost. For example, if Adobe decides that individual Illustrator users are a largely untapped market for, I don’t know, AfterEffects, why not throw it in, get them using both and use that down the road to up-sell them Premiere.
Here I both agree and, to some extent, disagree.
I’m not especially familiar with engineering software, but I am familiar with larger-scale corporate software packages that relate to things like company-wide newspaper pagination systems or GIS packages that are part of larger enterprise packages. With these kinds of things, yes, a type of subscription pricing has been common for a long time under different terminology
A difference with these things I’m familiar with and Creative Cloud, however, is that they’re esoteric products, highly specialized, very expensive and involve on- and off-site training, customization, user service agreements and all kinds of things that Adobe does not typically offer with their ubiquitous, consumer-level, off-the-shelf software that’s focused more on individual users rather than large, system-wide installations.
Whether Adobe borrowed this model to screw their customers or to simply ensure a steady stream of revenue from their user base might simply be a question of semantics and perspective.
I probably disagree on the inevitability of these subscription-based model becoming the norm, however. It might very well turn into that, but Adobe’s widely disliked subscription requirements have created niche opportunities for other, smaller software companies to bite off big pieces of what is now and has been Adobe’s near monopoly.
It’s only anecdotal, of course, but sometime within the next year I plan on dropping my two personal subscriptions (Mrs B and I) to CC in favor of Affinity’s increasingly sophisticated software suite — lots cheaper, quite capable and no subscription fees. I’m already using Affinity products for the majority of my freelance work, and it’s working out fine. Affinity’s not the only game in town either. There are at least half a dozen companies squeezing their way into this niche.
At my day job, however, it’s a different story. We have a corporate agreement with Adobe that’s more along the lines of the big enterprise-level software situations where, as you mentioned, ongoing and regularly occurring licensing fees are the norm and make more sense from a company-wide system and standardization viewpoint. At my day job, a company-wide subscription model makes perfect sense and streamlines having to keep track of dozens of individual licenses. At home with freelance work after hours, it does not make sense — it’s just a regular big expense best avoided by using alternatives that can be purchased as needed.
Are subscriptions the new dongles?
https://blog.quark.com/2017/12/are-you-using-a-dongle-are-subscriptions-the-new-dongles/
No subscriptions are not a dongle.
I purchased the dongle with the software and the software works as long as the dongle is plugged in.
If I stop paying the subscription ransom, my software no longer works. That sucks.
If anything comes along to give Adobe a run for their money, the best working part of that new software will have the ability to open all those ransomed files.
It’s not me you have to convince.
If my clients used it, I’d use it.
Quark lost the wide format market almost a decade ago.
