MichaelH wrote:
This guy seems to be trying to make a point to home users without his facts being correct in some instances. I am currently paid up on my home Photography Plan through Feb 2024 at roughly $100 per year. I buy a year or more whenever it goes on sale at B&H and just add another year to my subscription. And the subscription is measured by time to expiration so I am not going to experience any price increases for the duration of my paid subscription. I do not know where he got the $179 dollar per year option but he is overpaying. And at $8.50 a month it is less than 2 Starbuck's coffees!...
This guy seems to be trying to make a point to hom... (
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The guy who wrote the article is in Melbourne Australia, so he's probably reporting Adobe pricing in Aussie Dollars.
I compared the usual $9.99 a month price in U.S. dollars to my own upgrades of previous editions of PS and LR.... where I basically upgraded every edition but one, of LR from it's first introduction... and on average bought an upgrade of PS every other version. I was spending approx. $300 to $350 every three years, so very close to the same cost as the subscription.
I'd argue that an awful lot of people sign up for the LR/PS subscription package and only use one or the other. And I bet that another large group of people sign up for the LR/PS package who don't really need them, find themselves overwhelmed by the complexity and eventually just let the subscription lapse. The "low cost" of subscriptions... a $120/year "entry fee".... seems very reasonable. Especially when it's compared to the previous cost of around $650 for a full copy of PS and $150 for a full copy of LR... or around $800 "entry fee" for both, perpetually licensed.
But, after the initial purchase (which I made with PS in the mid-1990s when it cost a lot less),
upgrade costs were a lot less. The last time I upgraded PS it cost about $229. And the last time I upgraded LR it cost about $100.
My point, though, is that what appears to be a low entry cost has caused a lot of people who really don't need LR and PS to jump in and give it a try.... Folks who would be better served with Elements, for example, which can do virtually everything a relatively advanced amateur photographer might need. In fact, Elements can do more in the way of image editing than LR alone, which quite a few subscribers probably end up using by itself. PS is more likely to be needed by pros doing commercial work. Pros are also more likely to be shooting the volume of images where LR is most helpful.
In either case, whether people just use one of the two programs they pay for with their subscription... or if people subscribe for a year and never get very good at using either program, eventually dropping it.... Adobe is making tons of "money for nothing".
It would be no problem for Adobe to offer the programs both ways... giving people the choice of subscription or purchase. The way software is delivered via download these days, as far as the software publisher, it's the same cost either way.
Something I
don't want is one of their strongest selling points.... automatic updates. I disable those on most software. Too often I've seen "updates" that were faulty and caused problems. There was a really good example of that with LR a couple years ago, when an update made a bunch of changes that everyone hated and Adobe had to roll it back. I let other people be the "Beta testers" and deal with the problems, then do my own updates when I know they're solid and reliable. Auto updates? No thanks! Send me a notice when an update is available and I'll get to it when I get it,
after it's proven itself.
He also might make some good points about the cloud storage.... I don't use it so can't compare. I don't want my images sitting on hard drives somewhere on the Internet, that may or may not be secure. I have my own "cloud" storage with 36TB of storage space (gradually accumulated over the years.... not all bought at once). Works fine for me with LR and PS. So I don't know if Adobe's cloud storage would work better... but since I wouldn't use it, I certainly wouldn't want to pay for it as part of my subscription!