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Survey regarding new Photoshop Subscription Pricing

vjbelle

Well-known member
I received a survey from a marketing group questioning my reaction to a new Photography plan and new pricing. Two new plans are being considered - one with an enhanced Lightroom only that would sync across multiple platforms and 1TB cloud storage - Price $9.95 per month. The other plan would include both Lightroom and Photoshop without cloud storage for $19.95 per month. That is double the price of the current Photography subscription. There was no plan for Photoshop only. I'm sure others will receive the survey.

Victor
 

JohnBrew

Active member
I haven't received a survey yet, but this news is not surprising. I think everyone knew when Adobe went this direction that price increases were factored into their profit margin.
Personally, I have hope another program will supplant Adobe products for my pp.
 

RobbieAB

Member
Re: Survey regarding new Photoshop Subscription Pricingit's

I don't use Adobe products due to platform compatibility issues: I run Linux as my main OS. That said...

Cloud storage for a 1TB photo archive? Really? Just using remote storage for 500GB of photos on the local network is painful, and it's a LOT faster than connecting out over the internet in both latency and bandwidth. For the sake of showing the point, an 80Mbit link (max on VDSL around here) you are looking at 10MB a second, saturating the link, assuming adobes servers let you. 1TB is 1,000,000MB, so.. pulling that entire library down to local storage will take 100,000 seconds. That is well over a day, on a FAST internet connection. Given that those connections are asymetric, uploading will be slower. Remember, 1TB is only 10,000 100MB images.

Regarding the price increases: Who didn't see this coming? Adobe never made a serious claim that the subscription model was intended as a "business enabler", and given they scrapped the "stand alone" options, it is hard to see how anything other than a price increase was planned. Contrast the Adobe subscription licenses with the Capture One subscription licenses: P1 openly stated that the subscription licenses were intended for business customers who wanted "monthly pricing" (CFOs like this model as it makes it easier to model costs), and, so far, have continued to push the non-subscription option as the preferred one for individuals.

Adobe had managed to get themselves into the bind of having a near monopoly in a nearly saturated market with products that were for most purposes feature complete 3 versions ago. Add to that consumers were realising that they didn't need to follow the upgrade path blindly. Switching to a subscription model makes business sense if you can bring the customers with you in that scenario. There are (in theory) benefits to the consumers of a subscription model as it removes the pressure to introduce new functionality to sell the upgrade. If anything, it should in fact bring more of a focus to addressing current customer issues (AKA fixing the corner case bugs). Not having used Adobe I can't comment on how this side of it has played out, but the reports I've seen suggest it hasn't.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Re: Survey regarding new Photoshop Subscription Pricingit's

P1 openly stated that the subscription licenses were intended for business customers who wanted "monthly pricing" (CFOs like this model as it makes it easier to model costs), and, so far, have continued to push the non-subscription option as the preferred one for individuals.
Notably, they have also, unequivocally, stated that perpetual licenses (buy once, use forever) will always be offered.

Having sold Capture One to many larger businesses I echo that for planning purposes they often want a subscription model. So I'm glad they offer that as an additional option. But I'm also very glad they have the stand-alone photographer in mind. I think for most of our stand-alone photographers it's better to know the total full price up front and make the decision whether to buy, and then be able to use thereafter without being held hostage to a monthly fee.

One of Adobe's rationales for subscription licensing was that they would be able to do development in a continual way rather than having to hold back features until splashy big releases. Capture One has been doing this since version 8. For example see the recently released Capture One 10.1 which added new features like an improved style system (great for using a Capture One Style Pack), as a free upgrade from 10.0 released only a few months ago. Several years of rapid rolling C1 development is proof you don't need to switch to only offering subscription pricing to accomplish that goal.
 

schuster

Active member
And then there are those millions of us in the US with unreliable internet and speeds just above dialup... if at all.
 

young'ee

New member
......and those of us in the middle of Africa who still use drums........ OK, so we dont use drums but we may as well given how poor ALL the infrastructure is.

I can only dream of 80 or 100Mbps connections.

Definitely prefer to buy it, own it and never need to connect to anything to use it.
 
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