Photoshop / Lightroom for home users at reasonable price

@pXacs 

The bottom line is the Adobe does not offer an hourly plan and Photoshop is only available by subscription. We are volunteers who do not work for Adobe and cannot change anything. We can only tell you what is available, and I think we've covered that.

You have two choices:

• Subscribe to a Photoshop plan with Adobe
• Go another route

Let us know if you have other questions about the current plans. We cannot assist with billing.

Jane

@pXacs 

Have you looked at Autodesk pricing recently? AutoCAD is very comparable to Photoshop in terms of user market segment. That should be a good reality check. A subscription to AutoCAD costs $2500 a year!

$10 a month is about what I pay for my Netflix, HBO and Spotify subscriptions, each. Actually Spotify is a bit more.

Thanks @jane-e Though I would prefer a perpetual license, in the given cricumstances, I do feel that for small users some hourly plan should be launched. There are many users like me who may be interested. Adobe should do a test marketing and then take a call. I have a feeling if the entry barrier is reduced, automatically you have more users using your product. Many OTT platforms also did the same. First they started with high price, but when prices reduced, more users joined in. So hopefully its a win-win for both consumer & company. 

@pXacs "Right now if you want to purchase Photoshop the price is $19.99 (Photography Plan which also includes Lightroom) or standalone at $20.99."

In addition to what other have said:

• The $19.99 plan includes more storage space that you don't need.
• The $20.99 is the single app price and is an annual commitment, paid monthly. Forget this one.
• For $31.49 you can subscribe for a month and cancel without a cancellation fee.
  Do the math: 31.49 x 3 = 94.47. The Photography plan, prepaid, is 119.88 for the year.

See the plans here and use the filters on the left. Adobe does not make it easy to find the $9.99 Photography annual plan, paid monthly.

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

If you decide to try Elements, you can get a 30 free trial, which puts you in range of Black Friday, so watch for possible sales.

Jane

You already can subscribe for a month. But, surprise, that gets expensive after a while, so that really is for one-off purposes.

Hi @D Fosse I dont deny the fact that Photoshop is a great software. I had the CS6 Web but now its stopped working after I upgraded my system. It was a one time purchase. So in all these years I may have used it a few times, but its with me. 

Like you have taken the example of Ferrari, just on a lighter note, I can rent a Ferrari for a day! I don't need to pay the full value to own it. That's what subscription model is all about

The new Adobe licenses are more subscription based, so you don't own the license. You subscribe it as required and stop subscription. 

So my point has been that people who use it for a limited time, should get a time based subscription option rather than Pros who use it the whole day & make money on it. 

Its just a suggestion and may or may not be implemented 

The Photography plan is $10 a month. The $20 plan has more cloud storage, but you may not need that.

That's $120 a year, and it's hard to see a more "reasonable" price for what is, after all, professional-grade software. You can't sell a Ferrari at a third of the price because the buyer isn't going to take it out much or drive very fast anyway.

For the casual user, Photoshop Elements is another option. $100 for a "perpetual" license - and I put that in quotation marks because future OS updates may at some point cause it to stop working. So you'll have to factor in upgrades along the way.

Thanks @silk-m Yes, that is another option, but still for random use like may be a couple of hours each month even $120 is quite a bit. If its affordable around 30-40$ range for home users, it would definitely increase its use, as right now I am using another product which has many features like Photoshop (but ofcouse its not Photoshop) and that cost me close to a $100 but that came with lifetime use with option to upgrade to newer versions at half the price. As Photoshop has stopped all lifetime use versions and rely only on subscription I think this is the option. When lifetime license was available I had got the licensed Creative Suite Web 6 but that seems to have stopped working as none of the software work and it keeps saying license not valid when I upgraded my PC to latest Windows version. 

You can also choose the Photography (20GB) plan for $119.88 per year with unlimited usage time.