Here’s a (likely) unpopular opinion: I don’t mind the annual subscription charged by Adobe for their Creative Cloud Suite.
My Adobe Creative Cloud subscription just renewed for $641 and some change. Contrary to the opinion I hear from a number of creatives on YouTube, and reading online, the annual fee doesn’t annoy me all that much.
Here’s my reasoning: to obtain a Creative Suite license, it was about $1,300 – yes you owned the applications forever, but you missed out on feature additions. Typically, every two years, I found the feature additions to be significant enough to warrant purchasing the next Creative Suite update, so my post-college budget for Adobe creative products was roughly $1,300 every two years, or $650 annually. So at the end of the day, whether it was paying $641 annually or $1,300 every other year, the money leaving my pocket wasn’t all the different.
I’ve been a subscriber to Creative Cloud since 2014, and the price for the service hasn’t gone up in 5 years. It also seems that Adobe remains on a two-year cycle. The 2019 feature additions were lackluster, while I’m pretty excited about the new features that are expected to be coming in 2020.
Finally, I think as Adobe Sensei (Adobe’s AI) evolves, the annual updates to Creative Cloud applications will become more meaningful and help non-power users like me be more efficient and create better products for clients.
Comments are turned off to thwart those pesky spambots, but tweet me your thoughts. I’m sure this opinion won’t spark any controversy 🙄