A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
RIP Macromedia Fireworks though.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
