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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

$600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

I understand that there's lots of people that don't fit that description. That they would also like to use Adobe's tools is perhaps not entirely a sign of decline.

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It's a lot for teenagers and students. People prefer to use software they know, and if you keep your creative software from people in their formative years then you are going to struggle.

This might be less of a problem if they hadn't also slashed education discounts (pupils and students used to get 80-90% discount, presumably to discourage buying used or pirating)

Exactly. The SaaS model largely lacks a gameplan for long term sustainability.

How so? The SaaS model lets you price segment more flexibly. You can do a free (or very cheap) loss leader version that has a more limited feature-set (that students & hobbyists don't need) and a non-commercial license. Charge more for larger shops that need collaborative/more professional features.

Just because Adobe is doing the transition poorly (albeit you wouldn't know from their share price), I don't necessarily buy that it's a fundamental flaw in the SaaS business model. Indeed Figma & Canva are both SaaS companies themselves. As MSFT has shown, it doesn't take much for a giant to come back. I don't think Adobe is particularly cash-strapped so they can weather out a bunch of mistakes/internal realignment.

Their financials have done great since they switched. Strong growth in revenue, gross profit and net income.

This may be short-term growth at the expense of long-term sustainability.

The younger generation will reach for the more affordable options like Figma, Sketch, Canva. Everyone will know how to use these tools a lot better so this these will become the new standards in the workplace.

Right. I was explicitly responding to OPs claim that SaaS lacks long term sustainability because Adobe's approach seems like it could kill their long-term userbase.

Also, as an individual having your work locked behind a subscription fee is more than a little scary. For a company it's no big deal to have subscription autorenew in perpetuity, but individuals sometimes need to cut costs, and because of that subscription fees start to look like a ball and chain.

It's also a lot for designers and video makers in the developing world, most of whom are being sought as freelancers for small Western companies.

Going against the .edu discounts is... strange?

That's how you build your userbase 5-10 years into the future. That should be a no-brainer.

What's harder to price in a discount with SaaS is how to deal with smaller companies. Startups with almost no money but that could grow into lucrative customers down the line.

The problem is the kind of work that Adobe's tools are used for. Designers, video editors, artists, illustrators, etc. These are all careers that people get into by having a strong portfolio of prior work, which usually requires them to make stuff outside of professional work. So they need tools for personal use to get hired. Then when they start working they are going to want to use the tools they are familiar with.

That absolutely has the result of eating into Adobe's bottom line. Even big companies that can easily afford Adobe's prices aren't going to pay them if their employees don't even want to use the software.

I respectfully disagree. $600 USD per worker, per year is a massive expense for a small to medium firm, and those rates will only rise in the future. In my country at today’s exchange it's more like $830 per user per year! I much preferred the model of paying once and owning a copy of the software.

Sure you get updates now, Adobe was very bad at even basic patching before the CC era, they offer features that no one I know is requesting. It's like a fishmonger backing up the van and dumping a bunch of fish you don't need then billing you every month.

So bring on the competitors. I'm a big fan of Sketch on the Mac.

Massive? Oh come on, $600 is the cost of a moderately expensive chair.

Chairs are not replaced every year, plus that capital expenditure, not opex.

For a design house, licensing is not an insignificant cost of business. Its justifiable because thats the fastest tool for their workforce.

for a small company without a design team, it probably makes sense to just use the cheap/free stuff and style it out.

Or you can pay a one time $99 fee for Sketch which in most cases has all you need.

I took that route and haven’t missed Adobe at all.

Not all designers (creative work really) work on Macs!

I went to sketch.com and it said $99 annual subscription. Do you mean we can use the software even though we don’t subscribe anymore?

A chair lasts 10-15 years, so it's more like $40-60/year. $600/year chairs are pretty much the best chairs you can buy for money.

A chair will last many years, lets say 5, so amortised we are talking about a $830 x 5 = $4150 chair for every user.

That's massive in my book. Subscription software is a scam.

Go try and get your employer to buy you a new chair. In most places, that is like pulling teeth

I managed to get a new chair once. It took an ergonomics expert visit. Everyone was filled with envy from vp's down the line. In the end management pushed me into full time remote so they could take the chair.

And it wasn't even $600.00

It is frankly amazing to much how much office politics wind up revolving around chairs in some places.

I was pretty specific about what I said. In the US it's $15 dollars a week for the software and $1000+ a week for the user. It's not a big cost if the software provides that individual with much value.

Sure, they are clearly ceding a chunk of the market to other companies. I don't think it's obvious that this is a bad business decision...

Relative to buying software outright, yes, it's a big cost. Any it's also annoying. You don't own the software, which ends up effecting you negatively in a myriad of small ways.

Yes, not to mention the inevitable downtime when some cloud service can't authenticate. Not an improvement on working with local software.

I think Adobe at least gives you a 30 day grace period of no internet access.

This argument is always brought out like a standard bearer. Adobe software was NEVER a buy it once, own it for life. Sure, that particular version, maybe. But nobody stays on that version forever. Pre-subscription days to CS bundles, the bundles were $1200-$1500USD. They would release a new version of software each year, and they would charge $600USD for the upgrade. So, your $1200 in, plus an annual $600 in upgrades. Pre CS bundles, it was $800 for Photoshop alone. Premiere was even more.

Yes, but you could skip a version easily in the old days!

If you worked alone that might have worked. Sending/receiving files from someone with newer versions caused problems. I suffered through this once when doing 32page magazine layouts, and I was a version behind the printer. That experience alone convinced me to upgrade.

I always just send a PDF or IDML file to the printer. So far that worked out well

You'd send InDesign files to the printer? Why when there are various export formats printers accept..?

Going further back to Aldus Pagemaker. Plus, I come from a time of Quark and SyQuest drives to move data around. Things were different in the stone ages. PDFs were not a thing people used.

When I worked in print design, we’d typically send two things to the printer: a zip of the Quark or InDesign “collect for output,” and a PDF for reference.

Later, though, I seem to recall some printers accepting PDF/x-1a files – I don’t know if the industry has transitioned to that now, or if some still prefer a collect for output.

In my experience the printer was always a good few releases behind the current version. No-one wanted to upgrade unless they absolutely had to. The switch to InDesign from Quark was particularly drawn-out, and even then no one took Quark 5 files.

It’s very different now it’s all done by PDF - as long as it’s formatted correctly it doesn’t matter what program created it or how old it was.

If the moderately paid person is inefficient or unproductive because they don’t have a $600 piece of software, management is egregiously misguided about where to spend money. I mean if an add’l $600 spent on a position or role is the balance between being profitable and bankruptcy then something is seriously wrong in that company.

Sure they can have the user use a $0 piece of SW, but if it’s costing more than $50 a month in productivity via frustration, unfamiliarity or shortcoming (90% of the value at $0), Thats misuse of that person’s talent and detrimental to the success of the company.

If $600.00 a year is peanuts to your company I would invite them to send me $600 dollars a year.

It is not like $600 dollars is going to bankrupt your company. Their would be something seriously wrong if your company couldn't send me the money.

I have a hard time seeing how sending you $600 has anything to do with the productivity of a tool. Most people design PCBs using Altium which is $10,000 per license. Are you saying companies should send you 10k because they could use Eagle instead?

I wonder the number of PCBs designed with Altium ($$$$), Eagle ($$), and KiCAD ($0).

$600 is a budget item that will be available next year to spend. If you never expense me you will never create the budget room for when you really need it.

If the size of your company allows for $10,000 software purchases I would expense me for 2 copies. Next year you can use that budget for post covid grow.

It depends on that $600’s ROI. Are you going to make it worth it, the user productive or contribute to the goals of the company?

The idea is to pay me today to create budget room for you in the future for when you need that budget. By paying me $600 you create a budget increase that carries forward annually. Simply pay me yearly until you are ready to spend your free $600 budget.

The idea is you're spending $600 to use software that directly or indirectly contributes to the co's revenue. If you do it right, you make that $600 back and then some.

Maybe get a locally-priced alternative?

For every freelancer who sits in an Adobe product 40 hours a week, there's many who need an Adobe product for a couple hours every few months. For these people, it's a pretty terrible deal, and feels more alike a tax, or rent-seeking than it does like paying for a useful service.

This exactly. I am not asking my employer to spend so much money on something I am not using for free in my free time.

Subscriptions are also tricky to "purchase(?)" at some places.

I'm pretty sure I'm not actually allowed to charge them to a grant.

I tried buying a student discount subscription in my country and I could never finish the process.

I then contacted two local partners and none of them allowed me to buy the license as a student. One said that the student discount did not exist, and the other one siad thst my University had to buy it for me.

use it for one month. stop paying for it. pay for it again the next month you need it. stop paying for it.

frictionless process, smooth as butter

How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent? There's just this illusive concept people seem to have of owning software. This kind of model would have had me as a legit paying Adobe customer way back when I did "borrow" their software. I never had enough money to buy a >$1k bit of software for a couple of things, but I could have found $50 (maybe closer to $60 if not doing 12 months??) for a month's legit use of the software for a random freelance gig

But Adobe doesn't make it easy to pay for it one month and don't pay for it the next. Their site uses dark patterns which make you choose yearly subscriptions instead of monthly (happened to me even though I thought I had a monthly subscription) and terminating it is a whole ordeal with several steps.

> How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent?

All of these other activities are far from being friction-less. But the problem is that you have to remember to disable the thing otherwise it's going to burn a hole in the pocket and they are counting on that.

I fail to see how this isn't objectively worse than purchasing software outright.

Adobe sells access to Creative Suite in one-year increments exclusively. You can opt to pay monthly, but with a minimum one-year commitment.

this. Subscription software models extract more money from the pro market but cut out the casual market completely.

$600 is larger than most comic cover commissions (source: have been paid to do them), and unfortunately Photoshop is still a standard in many tangential industries that pay far below the minimum I strongly suspect that you assume for many (corporate) graphic designers.

I started creating graphics in high school on the Gimp, which was a natural transition to a (gifted) copy of PSCS2, and I've been using my college version of CS5 ever since afterwards. That route to graphic design would've never happened at their current prices. They're burning a whole generation of designers.

Fifty bucks a month for the whole suite is half of one page of comics posted to my Patreon. And my Patreon is pretty tiny.

Fifty bucks a month is less than I charge for one single-character flat color commission, which is something I can do in an hour or two.

I am not at all surprised that most comic cover gigs pay like shit. Comics generally pay like shit.

And all that said I sure did pirate Illustrator for a decade until I was at the point where paying the full subscription was the easiest route. If I was a broke student now I’d probably be getting into Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator.

>> $600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

Let's be crystal clear here.

$600 is the subscription for ALL of the Adobe Apps. That means you're paying $600 for what? 15-20 different apps? That means you're averaging around $40 per app. Which is roughly the same cost per month as other competitors products. Adobe XD is $9.99/month which is the same cost as Sketch $99/year and has more functionality then Sketch. If you toss in the additional $8/month for InVision, then XD is now cheaper. A lot of orgs like having one vendor for all of those apps as opposed to having multiple subs for several different companies.

I'm no Adobe apologist, but let's make sure when people are tossing around the $600 cost, we're comparing apples to apples. You can hack on them for their lack luster customer support, new versions not working on newer PC's and completely ignoring Linux users - but arguing about price? Not really a good enough reason not to use them in my opinion. Over the past few years, the newer apps they've come out with, they're keeping their pricing competitive: XD vs Sketch/InVision vs Figma.

Their pricing has also slowly come down as more competitors come into the market. I agree, I don't see them declining, they just need to stay competitive now that they are a number of legit products to compete with several of their products.

But that's a ton of cost for something you don't use often or if you're just starting out. That price tag eliminates the low end on-ramp into the products. They moved away from perpetual licenses and raised prices, which ensured there was room for competitors with a lower initial price and "good enough" quality.

I think the better way to look at it: Is $600 / year / employee enough of an incentive for competitors to step up?

I think lots of software companies( and entrepreneurs) are seeing Adobe's revenue stream and asking "Whats the moat?, What's stopping us from building the top 5-10 Adobe features and charging $300 / year?"

It would seem that Adobe doesn't have much of a moat and that perhaps their software will be commoditized as we move forward.

Agreed, it seemed outrageous to me 10 years ago but I believe now that Adobe simply focused on a certain segment. I wasn't in it. But that's just it; I had very little money, and I was mad that they'd excluded me. But of course they'd exclude me, haha.

You were never their target. But there were people thinking about you.

The cracked adobe products from 10 years ago provide most of the functionality the new subscription does at a big discount.

In a way those warez (sp) crackers cared about you more than adobe ever did.

> $600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

It's expensive for what a lot of those workers use it for. In the pre-SAAS days, companies would handle this by having an few license and not necessarily following the upgrade churn.

Going SAAS only "solved" that for Adobe, but disgruntled that user base that is now no longer served. This obviously creates market room.

$600 is nothing for a worker who is going to be in a software an appreciable part of every week. When it's $600 here, $300 there, $1000 here for stuff they only use a few times a month? Not a good deal.

>but disgruntled that user base

The user base that is disgruntled are the ones that would have been using the cracked versions anyways, so there's no monetary loss to adobe at all in that regard.

I get being a poor student that can't afford the software that you eventually need to know how to use. I grew up learning Adobe products from those cracked versions. However, now that I'm a working stiff, I pay for my software. I can't think of the last time I used a cracked version. Everyone has to start somewhere. Adobe now gives full version access via trials for 30-days.

> The user base that is disgruntled are the ones that would have been using the cracked versions anyways,

I disagree; I think I correctly identified a user base of corporations and users who would much rather do things right, but don't have 600/yr/user of need. Currently they are paying adobe subscriptions, or juggling free trials. If someone offers them good-enough software for significantly less, they won't think twice about jumping.

This is separate from the issues of students etc. using cracked or 'educational' versions. Some of them may not like the subscription only approach, but as you say that isn't a real impact to bottom line because they would never buy it.

Trial period was shortened to a week in May 2016. See https://prodesigntools.com/adobe-cc-7-day-free-trials.html

Yes and no. People become professionals using tools that they're familiar with.

600$ a year for an industry standard that makes a person productive isn't a lot. But what happens when 50% of your workforce is using a different tool that they're more comfortable with because they've already invested 5-10 years into learning it?

It's not expensive for a productivity boost once you're a professional. The question is, if you are a professional, and you're just now getting to the point where you can afford to start using Adobe tools, are they so much better than the tools you've been using your entire life that they're still worth $600 a month? Will they still provide a productivity boost that justifies their cost if they're not an industry standard anymore?

Right now, Adobe products are still at least arguably (if not obviously) an industry standard. But when we talk about a market decline, a current decline in hobbyist usage may signal a heavy future decline in the professional market. It's not necessarily the case that they're completely separate from each other.

I am so glad that only US-based professional workers are considered worthy of playing with Big Boys' Toys like Adobe products. /s

I'm not sure why you are being sarcastic about how a mega-corp approaches business decisions. Of course they do what makes the most money.

Part of my point is that people would do well to consider how Adobe approaches the situation before they expend a bunch of emotional energy wishing it were otherwise.

That's not the point. The point is that Adobe are being extractive assholes, and they know it. Setting the price point this high basically communicates that they consider anyone unable to pay this much a pleb, where all of their competitors don't. This is quite insulting, considering that we're talking about a graphic manipulation program rather than some hyper-specialised piece of enterprise financial markets software that only a few can use to its fullest.

> Of course they do what makes the most money.

Launching features on iOS/macOS first is a business decision that makes the most money (probably) but it's this very reason I slowly started replacing Adobe software.

Adobe XD, especially in the beginning, would leave Android and Windows users in a lurch focusing their efforts primarily on Mac/iPhone users.

For instance, real time mobile preview via USB (MISSION CRITICAL!!!!!), a feature requested December 16, 2016 ¹ was implemented on iOS on February 04, 2019. Worse still, this feature works on iDevices but only with a Mac. As of last December when I last checked, this was still not possible on Windows for either mobile platforms.

Sure, as late as 2009, users were evenly split between Mac and Windows. Prior, it was more Mac users. It has since changed with majority of Adobe users on Windows. ² So this steadfast commitment to Apple users makes no sense when the majority of your users are on Windows!

Switched to Figma once I started using Linux as my daily driver.

1. https://adobexd.uservoice.com/forums/353007-adobe-xd-feature...

2. https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/adobe-cc-os-market-...

There are plenty of "US professional workers" who do not need all of Photoshop's functionality. I've found Pixelmator meets all of my needs, for a one time purchase of less than $40. The moment that changes, I can purchase Photoshop; doing so now would be a premature optimization. I believe many still use Adobe products merely because they accepted that as a default.

I believe many still use Adobe products merely because they accepted that as a default.

This supports the notion that it isn't particularly expensive!

I didn't say "it's the cheapest" or "it's the best value", I said it wasn't expensive, and qualified the remark with a statement about the group of users I believe that Adobe targets.

People are replying that they think it's a bad decision to ignore user acquisition from less expensive licensing options, but that is separate from whether Adobe is having any trouble finding users (they appear to be printing money).

There's plenty of power users, but I think Adobe makes plenty of money off of users who don't need the product(s), but don't seek lower priced alternatives out of ignorance or apathy. The same could be said of things like computers and fitness equipment.

I use Affinity Photo, and previously used Pixelmator; I don't miss any of Adobe's overpriced products.

You have everyone arguing about whether $600 is too much for photoshop, but everyone should note that you can also get it for $10/mo. It doesn’t get you all the other adobe products, just photoshop and lightroom, but that’s fine for a ton of people.

The post I replied to was talking about multiple Abode products, so I don't think the focus on Photoshop is my fault.

Oh yeah definitely not blaming you, just trying to do a PSA for the discussion. People are probably focusing on it because the article emphasized it.

Depending on your use case, you can get similar products for a one-time purchase of less than $40.

That’s just photoshop though, honestly if you work in a field that needs this software photoshop alone is just one piece of the puzzle, once you add another app the cost goes so high it forces you to get all of them.

600 dollars a year is a huge amount for a software product. If that was their enterprise/seat pricing you may have a point but this is the standard price for everyone.

One thing I don't like about Adobe is that they set the same price for high and low income countries.

For many people and companies in my region their license is unafordable.

Other companies that offer subscription based es services, like Microsoft, Spotify, Disney, several antivirus vendors offer lower prices.

I mean, I could afford the student price, but not the commercial price of their subscription .

That's not how pricing works. Just because "you" can/are willing to pay doesn't mean the pricing is right.

What other software/service with the amount of users of Adobe charge $50/mo?

The pricing is set based on their lockdown through their closed file format, so the competitions can't exist.

Professionals use an assortment of tools, maybe one of which may be Photoshop. I would agree if your hypothetical processional only used and needed Photoshop.

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