The Adobe Conundrum

The Creative Suite from Adobe has been one of the tech industry’s most successful stories, with every single design/media oriented individual/corporation leveraging at least one of the Creative Suite’s products – be it Photoshop or Premier. So when Adobe announced in May that it would be abandoning the Creative Suite in place for a new subscription based model, the Creative Cloud, all hell went loose in the creative industry.

I personally have a copy of Photoshop CS3 and yes, its pirated because I cannot afford it. I am however, going to purchase a copy of CS6 Master Collection Student edition after I join my tertiary education next year. The Creative Cloud brings about a change in the traditional payment scheme in that you don’t buy the software, you rent it from Adobe. This enables ownership of the Creative Suite apps to be much easier and less painful than with the traditional ‘lump sum’ payment as the pricing to own the Creative Cloud suite of apps starts at just $26.99/month for students and $66/month for everyone else whereas the equivalent Creative Suite costs $310.97 for students and a whopping $3,925 (discontinued). Interesting point to note is that the CS6 Master Collection Student and Teachers edition costs just $310 in South East Asia while the same suite costs $999 in the United States. Sometimes the regional price gorging does surprise you a bit!

Anyway, back to point. The Creative Cloud is a great suite of apps but the pricing scheme is an issue because at $66/month, for a year’s subscription you are effectively paying $792 a year. Compared to owning CS Master Collection which costs $3,925, that is a huge saving. But, if you own CS6 Master Collection, you can continue to use it 10, 20 years down the road and not pay a single cent more, whereas if you subscribe for Creative Cloud, you have to renew your $792 subscription every year. If you are the kind of person/corporation that likes the be on the latest and greatest software release then Adobe’s Creative Cloud will make a lot of sense as because the Creative Suite is updated every two years and that would mean that per year it costs $1962.50 to own the latest and greatest CS whereas it only costs $792 to be on the bleeding edge of the Creative Cloud feature set. But, if you are like me and you like to own and use software for a very long time, the Creative Cloud simply does not make any sense. If I were to own CC in the way I owned CS3 (if I paid for CS3), it would have cost me $4752 since the release of CS3 in 2007 but CS3 Master Collection only costs $3,925 which means that outright purchasing the Creative Suite is a lot cheaper than subscribing for the Creative Cloud.

Of course, I don’t care about the pricing, I will purchase the Creative Suite 6 Student and Teacher edition when I am finally eligible next year and enjoy it for the rest of my life!

The South-East Asian CS6 Student pricing