I loved it at first but soon found that it was poor value for a hobbyist like myself. I was once a subscriber to the Adobe Photography package. There’s a reason why corporates love the subscription model and it’s not to save consumers money! But for hobbyists, especially those that are not doing it every day, it just adds up and up.

It’s a no-brainer for many professionals because it’s just a business expense that can be written off, and not a particularly large business expense. But if you use it a few days here or there, or weeks on weeks off, it’s poor value. If you use it all the time you get value for money. The problem I have with it is there is no Middle ground. If you’re interested, the data is here: Adobe Photoshop Cost.xlsx On a whole, though, things didn’t seem to have become much cheaper (or more expensive).

I’ll let everyone draw their own conclusions from this, because there are of course other factors at play when you compare CS and CC (for example, I realize you now get two pieces of software for the price of one). As you see from the graph, the yearly cost has been quite linear over the whole period and did not change much when the CC model was introduced. In total, this person spent a little less than $4000 since 1997, which averages to about €150 per year. I calculated the cumulative cost at yearly intervals (not all years had upgrades to buy) and plotted it in Excel: How much did this person spend? And how was the cumulative cost distributed over the years? Let’s look at an early adopter, someone who bought the full version of Photoshop 4.0 back in 1996, and always bought the updates whenever a new version came out, and switched to the CC plan immediately and continually up until now. In June 2013 the CC subscription model started, which has always cost $9,99/mo as far as I can tell. I managed to find all prices back until version 4.0 in 1996. And don’t forget you had to buy the upgrades, whereas in CC they are included.īut is Adobe really cheaper now? To investigate, I looked at the historic prices of Adobe Photoshop CS from archived versions of Adobe’s own website.

I guess there are a lot of people with the same sentiment: $9,99/mo is definitely affordable for a lot of people, so it seems a great buy, right? That $699 for Adobe Photoshop CS6 you needed to cough up was quite a hurdle for many amateur artists. This got me thinking and led me to a nice little foray in the Wayback Machine. I remember well the huge bills for Photoshop back in the day Don, they were scary!īut three coffees in Starbucks costs more than Photoshop+Lightroom every month so now it’s not really much to pay.

Adobe cc pricing