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Comment by Calavar | Hacker News Reader

That pricing sounds fair. Unfortunately, I feel that's the exception. Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 was $400 [1]. Now Dreamweawer Creative Cloud is $250 per year [2]. So after 1.75 years, you've already taken a loss.

[1] https://prodesigntools.com/products/adobe-cs6-pricing-list.h...

[2] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

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And for that $400 you got to run on one computer.

Office used to be $600 for one copy that could run on one operating system.

I can now get an Office 365 subscription for $99 a year for five users and I can use it on my Mac, a Windows PC, iPad, iPhone and all five users get 1TB of storage each

Plus the latest version of the software. I would still be using Office 2013 if I had to pay what I paid for it to upgrade every release (multiplied by the half a dozen or so O365 licenses I'm currently using.)

Office is also just cheaper, it's 1/4 the price for the lifetime license than it used to be. The family offering is still the best deal I've seen to get it though. Not all subscriptions allow multiple users or even you to use it at the same time on multiple devices though, Office is just pushing that sale.

I think Adobe's pricing is ridiculous, but this is uncharitable:

1. CS6 came out in 2012. According to the BLS calculator, $400 in 2012 is $532 today: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=400.00&year1=2...

2. You're cherry picking the worst one, do the math for CS6 After Effects at $999 (~$1.3k today) vs $21/month and you only break even after >5 years.

Still possible to use CS6 today, it still works on Windows. So you would have definitely saved money by now if you still used it.

It’s been along time since Adobe was that cheap. (=

I don’t want to defend Adobe, but inflation is real.

And they used to have upgrades that cost less money.

I think this price is more or less what it used to be, the real advantages of that everyone’s just up-to-date all the time.

I can’t imagine trying to support software on like 20 different versions, that would’ve been insanity for the support team.

Keeping everyone on one version is probably the real cost savings money maker for Adobe here. =P

What would be more interesting is to compare over 10 years for someone who buys upgrades (CS2->CS3->CS4 etc.) as they come out.

Additionally the individual Dreamweaver price is very high compared to "All Apps" plan at $660 per year.

> What would be more interesting is to compare over 10 years for someone who buys upgrades (CS2->CS3->CS4 etc.) as they come out.

but nobody does that, really.

most people i know skip entire versions of windows (eg: 7->10), let a lone individual software releases.

Heck, even pirates sometimes skip versions.

I remember installing and using pirated versions of Photoshop 6, and then Photoshop 7, and then Creative Suite 2.

I bought an academic license for Creative Suite 4 Master Collection.

Later I subscribed to Creative Cloud for a while. But I swore to not buy from Adobe again after that because that was actually a bad experience.

You just reminded me that Windows 8 was a thing, I had to check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Version_hist... to remember it.

Which is why subscription software is better for everyone. Everyone is on the latest version.

Why does everyone have to be on the latest version?

They don't, It's just a better result for the users who get newer and better software, and a better result for the sellers who only have to support one version and get a consistent cash flow.

But what if it is newer and not better? Lightroom regularly breaks plugin compatibility, increases resource consumption and processing time, or simply stops working. If your workflow depends on software, that no longer works after a forced update, what are your options?

There are people running ancient MacOS versions, because that allows them to keep using professional firewire audio interfaces they have.

How would subscription model that breaks expensive hardware compatibility, breaks all your existing photo/video projects (aperture/final cut), or breaks compatibility with really expensive plugins needed for work be better for users?

Agreed, frequently "newer and better software" simply isn't and for something that you rely upon, such as audio processing software or image/film editing tools, cannot be left to the whims of tech companies who have proved themselves over and over again to be unworthy custodians of these important tools. It's better to get a hardware+software combination that works and then just use that forever without modifying it. It will always perform as well as it did on day one, it's only pesky updates that make computers slower.

You say that, but then stuff like OnePass and Dropbox decide to reneg their subscription services down-the-line or simply make their clients worse. A lot of the time, a subscription to a program gives the developer no incentive to iterate on what already exists.

And then you just drop them for a competitor. Since you have no sunk costs, you lose nothing by hopping to whatever the best option is other than a small amount of pain migrating, But for something like dropbox, there isn't that much lock in.

What competitor?

In most cases this is entirely unrealistic.

I've never heard of OnePass so I have no idea, but Dropbox is very easy to replace. I'm also not even sure how you'd expect a "pay once" model to work for cloud storage.

For cloud storage a subscription model makes perfect sense, since the entire point is that you're renting server space on an ongoing basis. What I don't want to do is have to rent simple machine code that should be executable by my processor perfectly fine without any third party involved. Why should I have to rent Photoshop if it runs perfectly fine without internet access? I'm not renting server space from Adobe. It costs them nothing for me to run the software. They just want to charge me on an ongoing basis for no good reason.

For a password manager KeePassXC is better than all proprietary offerings and it's free and plenty of implementations are available on all major platforms.

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