Creative Cloud necessity

Following this thread, other topics and reading the Photoshop Elements feature page, I expected to be able to "Save to cloud" in my copy of Photoshop Elements 2021.  I could not make it work.  I reset the settings, uninstalled, reinstalled and searched for options to turn it on.  Finally I started an online chat with Adobe tech support.   After explaining what I had tried, the tech asked me to wait for him to get help.  He returned and insisted that "Save to cloud" was an experimental trial and test.  As such it was limited to only a small group of users and I was to NOT expect it to work as I was not one of the randomly selected few to recieve it. 

No.  However, you will need to create an Adobe account to register the products.   There will not be a Creative Cloud subscription fee.