There has been a lot made of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription business model. Mainly that the deal wasn’t great for photographers. It was a great deal for those working in creative fields where they used two or more of the Adobe products, but for photographers the $49.99 a month price seemed a little steep. Well, that has all changed.
During the Adobe portion of the keynote address at Photoshop World in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a new plan aimed at photographers. Adobe is offering Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 to current owners of Photoshop CS3 or later for just $9.99 a month. That is you get the latest versions of both Photoshop and Lightroom along with a Behance Pro account and 20 GB of web storage for just $9.99 a month. That is a great deal.
Now this deal doesn’t start till next week, so you have to wait until September 16th, but I really think that Adobe has stepped up to the plate with this one. I did discuss this with some Adobe representatives during the Photoshop World and they did clarify some points. Once you sign up for this deal, its good for a very long time. The Adobe lawyers will not allow them to say forever, but they told me that they plan on keeping it at this price point for the foreseeable future. Now, the deal ends in December unless you were at Photoshop World and got the free year of Creative Cloud then you will have the option when that free year is over.
If you have never purchased Photoshop in the past there will be a deal for you as well, but it’s not ready yet. This will be more than $9.99 but hopefully not a whole lot more. I do not know what price point this will be.
Here is the Abode Blog post on the deal. CLICK HERE
Oh.. and there will be a new release of Lightroom at the same time this deal goes live.
**** UPDATE ****
I got this comment on FaceBook yesterday:
Alan, you take great shots. But Adobe is not our friend in the past 3 or 4 years. The stock price is going up because they are reaming their client base- us. It looks short term if you ask me.
I want a disk that I paid for. I want it on my hard drive and I don’t wan’t an endless withdraw from my bank account. – PERIOD. Even if it’s $3 a month. I’ll switch to F’n Corel if they keep it up.
and here is my reply…
XXXXXX you are right, Adobe is not my friend. But I don’t want them to be my friend. I want them to be a photo editing software company that puts out a service that I now use. Yes, it’s no longer a product, it’s a service and I want that service at a reasonable price and I want them to update the service often and stay in business for a very long time. Do I need them to be my friend, no. If the stock price going up bothers you, buy the stock, then when they make money, so will you. As for the idea that you won’t use the service because they don’t let you keep the software if you quit, get over it. The cable company doesn’t give you TV for free when you no longer pay the bill and you cell phone provider and internet provider doesn’t keep letting you use the service when you stop paying..
I want to add one more thing. Adobe is not going back to boxed software any time soon. So if you don’t like it, time to break out Corel.
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