Personally I’ll never go back to Adobe as long as they force me onto a monthly subscription.
1. Small businesses don’t upgrade because they fear change in general. Buttons disappearing, functionalities changing and new things like cloud integrations scare/confuse a lot of them. They also don’t want the pain of paying people for time to relearn what used to work just fine.
2. Subscription costs are very much more visible on P&L’s than one time expense charges. When the eventual tight times come, recurring costs are the first thing on the chopping block.
3. As you know, cutting most subs means cutting functionality as well. For small places like photography studios, they don’t want their core software to be beholden to a required recurring expense. They want to own it, so if all else goes away, at least it still gets the job done.
It’s often simplified to be a cost thing, but it almost never really is. They can afford it, but they don’t like what they give up in the model.
Of course they don't give you a cheaper way to only buy Lightroom which is the annoying part.
So - no.
I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.
I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.
If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.
I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.
The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.
But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.
[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.
Top of the line programming tools like Jetbrains give you their entire list of about 10 apps for $12 or so a month from 3rd year (Starting from about $20 a month for the 1st year) and of course individual apps are even cheaper.
Heck, even MS gives you the entire office suit for $10 a month with 1TB of cloud storage which I think is a good deal.
We need more competitors to drag Adobe's monopoly down. Their apps are built on ancient code, the performance is so bad compared to apps like Affinity Photo and they put folders and icons all over the Application folder on Mac I can't believe its annoyance.
That’s about a day or two worth of billable work for the cheapest employee.
And even without those points, Adobe's pricing is just off from other professional tools.
But if you aren’t a professional designer, you no more need Adobe’s high end offering than a non professionally developer needs to spend thousands on an MSDN license.
Adobe's pricing is just in line with most professional software. AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Vectorworks all cost a similar amount of 1000s of dollars.
That doesn’t count the money I spend money on Udemy and soon hosting costs for side projects.
$60 a month to do your job is not that much. I’m not even making money from the money I’m spending, that’s just to keep up with technology.
I don't know, man. I guess they will charge what the market lets them get away with. It's a for-profit business, and if they do one thing right, it's marketing & sales. You might be pissed off about the pricing, but the market stands behind it - there was a lot of skepticism even internally on the subscription model, but I think the executives were proven right on this one. You may hate them for it, and anecdotally it's easy to find Adobe haters... but not all the market does. AFAICT, far from it, there are still way more promoters than detractors. And the subscription pricing opened up a large market that nobody even thought existed - not to mention the fact that it made revenue streams more predictable. At this point, I think it's really hard to argue that the pricing is hurting the company in any way - if you look at the numbers that is, not at anecdotes about how one particular person/ set of persons feels about it.