Subscription cost increasing AGAIN

sunnya32000603  wrote I think we have to think about Adobe alternatives as they increase their price very frequently. It's killing our pocket.

Since the introduction of CC I've seen one price increase of the $-price. There may be local price fluctuations due to devaluations, but nothing influenced by Adobe.

There was some shouting a few months ago, because Adobe tested locally a change of availability of the Photography plan. That has been retired so the Photography plan is still available for 10$/month.

B_Taylor  wrote I will cancel my Photography Plan subscription if it doubles. I use Photoshop about twice a year anyway. If I can find something close to Lightroom in power and cataloging, I will change, otherwise, I'll buy the standalone version of LR.

Currently the Photography plan is still at about 10$/10€. There are no plans that I have knowledge of that this will change. However there is a discussion currently going on here: Where is the 20Gb Photography Plan?

My personal feeling: There is, however, a tendency to move to the cloud model (so having the pictures loaded up to the cloud). I have around 3Tb of picture data in constant expansion. I use Photoshop and I would love to keep the possibility to edit with Photoshop. That is currently not possible with Lr -- the cloud based Lightroom.

professional "level design" software - 't was a words pun. I had hoped the three emoticons would have conveyed the joke better.

Aside from the pun, I am glad to see that you put a qualifier in your statement. Adobe is indeed king of the graphic design software market, though not nearly so much in other creative markets. Web, Game, Video, Film, 3D, 2D animation, digital painting,... As you said, Adobe's products play a role in these markets, but are hardly "the best". In some of these Adobe's products have a marginal presence (Web, 3D, Games), in others more capable industry level products prevent Adobe from dominating.

I would have to disagree that the game design market is niche: compare the US game market revenue of ~17 billion dollars to the ~9 billion dollars US graphic design services revenue (2015-2016). Games is by far a larger world-wide market.

Anyway, it is quite possible (and even preferable in a number of cases) to remove Adobe software from your pipeline, and be regarded as a creative professional. Depends on the job and market which you happen to work in. Some of the software out there puts Adobe's efforts to shame.

Yeah this last raise is the final straw for us. Have used Photoshop since the 90s and always been loyal but now we only use Photoshop, id and Dw and it's $80 AUD per month? Too many great alternatives now to justify these costs.

It's not that it is really cheap, but compared to the upgrade prices we paid, the new pricing structure is competitive. It even allowed us to "upgrade" 3 licenses of different design suites to the all apps increasing effectively the possibilities to our people. And we added easily 2 licenses, because the monthly payments did not shock the same managers that at the time refused the acquisition of the perpetual licenses.

If you are a hobbyist and you where used to upgrade each 20 years only, then it is expensive indeed. But you can take the subscription on the month. Doing work for your club? Take the subscription for a month or two and the brochure is done and printed.

Inexpensive alternatives do exist. Serif is playing its hand straight into the market segment in which you find yourself with its Affinity range: Designer (Illustrator), Photo (Photoshop), and Publisher (InDesign). Publisher is currently still on beta, and a free download. Photo and Designer are inexpensive, and all three work together in much the same way as Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

They're not there quite yet, but already very usable. And very affordable (perpetual license, no rent!): . Since Serif aims them at the segment of dissatisfied Adobe users, the transition is quite painless. And (I am guessing you work on Mac) the performance on Mac is generally impressive. Publisher looks very promising: it reminds me of when InDesign was first introduced.

Also have a look at PhotoLine (which I prefer for image editing nowadays, even over Photoshop) and Krita (great free open source digital art software).

Of course, Quark still exists, and still offers a perpetual license. They might give you the competitive upgrade, but Quark is still quite expensive.

A free open source option is Scribus. Clunky, but serviceable.

You could also continue to rent Photoshop & Lightroom for $10 a month, and switch to other apps for the rest.

All in all, lots of options out there, for much less upkeep.

This is a quite fruitless discussion, as the subscription model is quite successful. There was only one price increase since its existance. Its, however, a different discussion if a price is correct or to high. I still own an iPhone 6+.There is no relation between a telephone and the software system. Do not compare Apple with Adobe. Apple is very often a « I want it » phenomena as Adobe is a « I need it » situation.

But anyway prices are not decided on an engineering level, and as this discussions are good for a while, arguments wear out.

Adobe is successful. As long as Adobe is successful Adobe will not change the strategy. And this is a purly commercial decision.

franchescao77442882  wrote QuarkExpress is very similar to InDesign. QuarkExpress is offering half price off for all customers switching from InDesign and it’s a perpetual license!  I have to switch since we can’t do offline deployment.

QuarkXpress was the market leader before. They lost market share because of their expensive license policy and their slowness for implementing new technology. Good luck if you changed. I'm sure you can do great work in QuarkXpress.

However, Adobe allows offline and on-line deployment.

I suppose you add a promotional offer limited in time. The standard subscription price increased, but not that much.

Your CS6 license is still valid, if you did not sell off the software and license.