There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.