Photoshop is $10 per month in the photography plan on adobe's site, but only on an annual basis. MSRP and business users pay $30+ a month by itself. In either case where are you getting $32 every six months?
I guess the photography plan is competitive, but it's still a subscription. I hate paying monthly fees for anything, especially for something I don't use. Much prefer to pay a higher fixed cost and finance that on my own... and yes I preferred this when I was a poor student; I bought a lot of expensive software back in the day by saving what I could from my $12/hour (in 2004 money) day job.
And believe it or not, being able to open the program and have it simply work, without going through a bunch of login/update/subscription hassle, is really important for creativity. Technical crap regularly derails my creative process when I'm manic with an idea, so the possible premium is worth it.
You pay per year. $120 gets you access to the photo bundle for one year. That's 30x cups of Starbucks drip coffee a year. Creative people who are 'struggling' blow more than that a month on weed, beer, coffee or Tinder. We all make choices that show what we prioritize.
Anyway, the subscription model for this kind of software works really well. Software keeps becoming better and so far Photoshop has been running circles around the limpy thing known as Gimp
P.S. I just got hit with the next year charge. I was annoyed so I tried installing CS 6. It's OK. It still beats Gimp but I would rather not drink coffee or smoke weed for a month to have money to pay for the yearly subscription for the photo bundle.
P.P.S. And if you are really really really struggling "creative" you are probably young and either go to school or have a friend that goes to school which can get you it under the EDU discount, which is peanuts.
Photoshop is overall a lot cheaper under the subscription model than it was before. A boxed copy used to cost $800-$1000 (in 90s/00s dollars). Even if you skipped some versions and upgraded every 3ish years, it would come to ~$300-$350/yr. You can get an annual subscription today for $240/yr. And that's without factoring in inflation and the fact that you can just pay for a month or two of use if you want. And you're always on the latest version.
Adobe Photographers is actually a pretty reasonable subscription for me. I don't use Photoshop a lot. But I do use it and Lightroom I would do pretty much every upgrade anyway. If I just did the occasional Photoshop thing, I'd probably buy Photoshop Elements (Or use GIMP).
I don't understand what you mean. You can get the Adobe Creative Suite with Photoshop, Lightroom, some other stuff I don't remember (don't use), for $10/month.
> The photography subscription (Photoshop + Lightroom) costs $720 over six years. Given that Adobe offered upgrade promotions (e.g. CS5 to CS6) for about half off, it's roughly the same price as it was before.
Very interesting analysis. I was inclined to doubt it so I checked and you are absolutely right: Adobe does indeed have a Photoshop + Lightroom bundle [0] that costs ~$10/month or $119.88/yr, such that it comes to $720 over a six-year period.
There has to be a lot of value in it for me to pay that kind of money for temporary usage of software. The closest thing right now is Jetbrains all products pack. I consider every November when the renewal comes up if I am going to continue. Adobe Photographers subscription is a great deal because the total cost for a year is way less than the price it used to cost to buy Photoshop flat out.
Where are you getting your prices? I never remember being able to buy photoshop for $199. I remember it more like $600+. And the website shows $120 annually and that includes Photoshop AND lightroom AND 20GB of cloud storage.
If you need more than just photoshop, the deal is even better.
I don't know. I think a lot of people have decided they like things like the Adobe products subscription.
Instead of the several thousand dollars you would have had to pay for the various softwares in the lineup up front, you just pay $50 a month. Which is reasonable of you previously used more than just Photoshop and maybe upgraded every 3 to 4 years.
If the end result is a similar cost, I would much rather keep my capital in the business and make a monthly payment.
I think that for a professional designer a £15 (or whatever it is now) monthly charge that can probably be expensed or tax offset anyway is small compared to learning a new UI or the potential difficulties that can arise when handing a non-Adobe file to a print shop.
What Adobe have achieved with photoshop is become the de facto standard for many aspects of design and image work. They have done this through a mixture of (1) being the best practical option and (2) some vendor lock in. We may not like it but well done to them.
From what I'm seeing, Photoshop only costs $20/month (actually $20.99) if you commit to an annual plan. It's $31.49/month if you want month-to-month.
And in the past, every time I've wanted to cancel a subscription, I've had to spend ~30 minutes with their support. How are you able to turn it on and off so easily? I'd love to figure out a way to avoid their normal cancelation flow.
I finally got on the Adobe train this year, because the cost of the photographer bundle is trivial. It's less than a Dropbox subscription at this point.
If ~$10/month is too much for the best photo organiser and the market leading photo manipulation software, then you're basically saying no-one should be able to make any money out of software, ever.
Years ago, if you wanted to use Adobe Photoshop, you had to pay thousands of dollars for a license. Now you can pay for a subscription for the period of time you use the software.
It is easy to justify the subscription cost if you are making money using Photoshop.
> I did a lot of Photoshop a few decades ago. I can't afford > $1000 per year for a hobby.
Adobe's Photographer Plan, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom, is $9.99 a month, $119 a year. Not sure where "over a thousand dollars per year" comes from.
Speaking for myself, I don't use Photoshop often enough for $30 / month to be worth it. I wouldn't have been able to justify thousands of dollars either, but if I could pay a couple of hundred for a perpetual license with an upgrade discount when new versions come out that would get my business.
But licenses for the old Creative Suite were an eyewatering $2500 USD for the full suite. Sure, you'll get there in four years with a full-on CC subscription, but for the large number of users who only want Photoshop, the ~ $10 USD / mo. plans are pretty appealing (and Adobe now makes money off of them, since it's easier than pirating it to pay for it).
You're right, it's 50$ for full monthly membership, 20$/month for single app and it goes down only for ultra specific cases (i.e. 10$ for photoshop only for existing CS3 license owners [1]).
I messed it with the Revel subscription witch is lower (but still 6$, 1$ higher than I remembered)
Subscription models are great for professionals (and companies), but amateurs, a single year of the Adobe Photoshop + Lightroom bundle is over 2x what a perpetual Affinity Photo license costs. (I just wish Serif came out with a photo management product, but in the meantime, it's not too bad to use digiKam for some management and `aws s3 sync` to back photos up in an s3 bucket.)
What's sad is that it was not easy to even see that there's still a Photoshop Elements product these days with a one time price, though I have no idea what the support is, and what upgrades cost. I had to search around to find it. It costs $99, though there's sales and bundles yada yada yada. The Adobe "comparison" page (which I still don't know how to navigate to) just seems like they want to funnel everyone into the subscription offering: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/photoshop-vs... It seems like Elements would be the "hobbyist" license, the subscription model would be the pro version, but it's very, very not clear.
The product that gets subscriptions right is Autodesk Fusion 360. There's a Personal Use tier that's free, which provides pretty much all the features you need for most hobbyist style 3D design and CNC usage. You need the serious features, you pay the expensive license, but, you're probably making money at this point, so it's a necessary tool. Fusion 360 changed it's licensing in 2020 which confused a lot of people, but really, they used to have a "startup license" or "personal use" license that was really vague, and I think was being taken advantage of by actual businesses. It's just simpler now, and I think it's more obvious.
I guess the photography plan is competitive, but it's still a subscription. I hate paying monthly fees for anything, especially for something I don't use. Much prefer to pay a higher fixed cost and finance that on my own... and yes I preferred this when I was a poor student; I bought a lot of expensive software back in the day by saving what I could from my $12/hour (in 2004 money) day job.
And believe it or not, being able to open the program and have it simply work, without going through a bunch of login/update/subscription hassle, is really important for creativity. Technical crap regularly derails my creative process when I'm manic with an idea, so the possible premium is worth it.
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