It’s not. I bought FCP X in 2011 for $299. If you are just counting my own usage, that is $25/yr over the last 12 years, but I get to keep using for many more years, and both my kids use it through family sharing as well, so we are down to $5/year per person or less, without having to mess with yet another subscription.

I used to work on a competing product, and subscription pricing will work better for most people who are in this market, so my personal use case is an outlier I know.

Edit: all that said, I’m excited to be the first person to subscribe to Logic on the iPad. I hope that subscription is Family Sharing enabled as well!

The cost may be cheaper over $time_period (debatable), but in one case you have fully functional software and in the other you have nothing.

I know Adobe has “proven” pros will take subscription software and like it, but for every day users who like to mess around now and then, I have no interest in a perpetual subscription.

At some point the Final Cut Studio package was like $1000. Still not as bad as AVID back then…