ISSUE 21.50 • 2024-12-09 SOFTWARE By Will Fastie Adobe converted its Elements line into subscription products, while at the same time claiming it hadn
[See the full post at: Adobe doubles down on subscriptions]
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Adobe doubles down on subscriptions
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I have used Adobe on and off over the yeas. My son, uses it daily for work. Needless to say, we’ve both been frustrated with them. So much so, that with my last comments to him, he suggested using Affinity software. It is a purchase, not a subscription and offers a suite with a Designer, Photo and Publisher option that rivals if not outshines Adobe. My son says that they have not bloated the software and continue to enhance it without making you pay for the updates. I purchased the Black Friday deal – all three of the programs for ~$80. Or try any one of them for ~$30. AND they are cross platform: Windows, Mac and iOS. It may not be for everyone, but I can say that after just a few projects in the Affinity suite, I’ll never use Adobe again.
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You ask “Can Adobe get any more annoying?”. The answer is a resounding YES.
When I installed Lightroom, Photoshop and Creative Cloud on my MacBook Pro the CPU utilitzation jumped. So much so that my battery was draining in 5 hours or less. It turns out that some application that was running constantly and consuming all the CPU cycles it could find.
I traced down the offending application. The application was installed by Adobe. I removed the application from the system. No more problems with battery draining or CPU maxed out. Does Adobe even test their own crap? Yeh, I know, silly question.
Adobe installs tends to take over a system and consider itself the only application the user should be running. Adobe is at times like a cancer. It spreads fast. It can be cured but takes significant effort. Adobe will continue this pattern and will find ways to make it worse.
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I have also bought new issues of PSE for probably 20 years. I skipped a year or three, not seeing any significant improvement or new feature set from one version to the next. I counted heavily on the indexing feature of PSE Organizer. At the time, I was writing for several magazines and attending a lot of trade shows. My photo collection was well into four figures of images, and I often needed to pull up the photos I had of this person or that product or genre.
When moving from one PSE version to another, I noticed that the organizer became increasingly corrupted. First, my list of name tags all moved under one name heading, so that Jane Doe and two hundred other people all became associated with John Doe. Trying to repair the index made things worse. An attempt to restore the database from a backup really messed things up. Now, I effectively have a bunch of folders with times and dates (presumably, when the photos within were either taken or indexed) and a bunch of photos within those folders. Trying to find a specific photo is a game of open folder, examine contents, close folder, move to next folder.
I’ve also become annoyed at Adobe’s notion of technical support. There essentially isn’t any. Adobe sponsors a complicated user forum where you’re supposed to get help from other users, but it doesn’t work well. I get more help from less targeted forums like this one.
My last departure from Adobe was when I moved to Nitro Pro as a PDF utility. Their tech support sucks in much the same way that Adobe’s does, but I’m not paying as much to be victimized.
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My experience exactly. I now use CS6 on Windows 7 machines and am quite content. Adobe saw my last purchase with my upgrade to CS6. Their customer service has been rude since they turned off the server turning the lights out on my 30 year relationship with Adobe….and AutoDesk products.
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Useful insights. I bought it, too, figuring that my occasional upgrades were effectively the “same price” over time. BUT…
Haven’t completed playing with the new 2025 version, although it seems that some of the Adobe advertising for functionality is deceptive. I tried one of the AI components (to remove people from the original image) and was told that I had “used all of my credits. WHAT???
Look as though purchase of the program doesn’t get the user all of the features that they say are available within. Adobe is trying to get me, with my brand new term license, to upgrade again — already.
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Adobe and many companies like them are festering piles of deceptive crap. Unfortunately, everything is becoming subscription or term based with the app ceasing to function upon expiration. Sad times.
This is currently humor for now.9 users thanked author for this post.
If anyone thinks free software is an alternative, remember — unless the software is collecting data on you and reselling it, there is no revenue stream to insure future availability, support or development.
One reason companies have gone to subscription models is that between support and development costs, the perpetual licenses weren’t being upgraded consistently enough to justify the cost of providing the software. If you haven’t talked to actual software developers or people who’ve worked for commercial software companies, you may not understand what these companies are up against.
-- rc primak
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Here’s a case study for software subscription haters. (And I used to be a software subscription holdout, but rc primak is right: if you are highly dependent on an app for creative work you do, and would be seriously inconvenienced by losing it, you need to be paying in somehow. Having only paid a modest fee for an app several years ago doesn’t give the company a way to pay their bills and keep the app going. Now granted, this is a harder stance to defend for Adobe, which is apparently doing quite well financially. But there are a lot of niche app companies out there that are not as well off.)
This past year, a premiere software package for music composers and arrangers, Finale, went bust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finale_(scorewriter)
They held out on going to a subscription model, and it proved to be a fatal mistake. This was very expensive standalone software, $600 full-price 15-20 years ago and probably got more expensive recently, with version upgrades half-price,. Music is difficult to get down on paper/screens and very difficult to program computers to handle, compared to working with words and numbers. Professional and very serious amateur composers and arrangers fought through the very steep learning curve and loved this app because it could handle so many challenges that other music arranging programs would not even attempt, and it could play the entered music back. But innovation that users would pay to upgrade for became harder for the devs to come up with, and upgrade editions were getting spaced out at increasing intervals: one year, then two years, then three years, with nothing new since 2021. So company revenue was withering. Now there is an open-source competitor. It’s not quite as good, but it’s getting better.
This past fall the company gave one month’s notice on pulling the plug on Finale and offered only to continue support for one year. After that licensees can continue to use it, but they better keep the same hardware running it and avoid updating their OS if they do, or it will stop working, I’m sure. And there’s probably no way to activate it on new hardware once the servers go down for good. So much for “permanent” or “lifetime” licenses.
The big problem for Finale users is that all those files they created with scores and arrangements and parts… there are often ways to attempt to import those files into other music apps, but it’s very messy and tedious and often doesn’t work well, especially when the writer was using Finale specifically because it could handle a task other music apps can’t do. The demise of this software is seriously inconvenient at best for many long-time Finale users.
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I bit the bullet when it first came out about ten years ago and am on the $9.95 US per month Photographers Bundle and I’m giving a copy to my son for another $9.95 US per month.
Lightroom is so wonderful (IMHO) that it is worth it. I’ve never been a real PhotoShop junkie, but I get by.On the other hand, my son and I tried a few second rate video editors and decided that a really first rate one is free unless you have significant pro needs: DaVinci Resolve. Like any BIG piece of software, there is a learning curve. There is also an excellent audio editor (Fairlight) built in.
For my audio work, my mainstays are Magix Samplitude Pro Suite (since 1999) and iZotope RX Advanced (since 2011). I recently bought Cedar VoicEX for a big ongoing project and it’s the best I’ve seen at cleaning speech.
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Macrium Reflect did much the same thing as Adobe Elements. The difference was in the presentation.
Paramount Software (Macrium Reflect’s vendor) is clear about what is a subscription and what is a perpetual license. No three-year term licenses, but a “lifetime discount” for converting perpetual Reflect 8 licenses to subscription Reflect X licenses. Whether this is a fixed rate forever, or could vary when the next Reflect version comes out is unclear from what the site says. But the pricing is attractive. (This may have been a Black Friday deal, so the pricing may have changed.) I see no slowing down of product improvement with Macrium Reflect X vs. its predecessors.
Adobe is not being honest in this way. They are saying that just because renewals are after three years and some program functionality will continue after that time, the licensing is not a subscription. I am not a business lawyer, so I won’t argue over the language used. But the arrangement, while a bit different from Reflect X is in many ways essentially the same. You can still restore from backups using the old Reflect 8 or Reflect X after you stop paying for the subscription, but you can’t make any new backups. Similarly, you can use the Adobe organizer after the license term expires, but you can’t use the editor. (Although, the editor is probably the part of the program most users are interested in.)
For those who don’t want a backup product which is on a subscription model, I have heard good things about EaseUS ToDo Backup.
-- rc primak
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…a really first rate one is free unless you have significant pro needs: DaVinci Resolve.
Of course you realize, the only reason DaVimci Resolve can offer a free product with so many good features, is that enough people pay for the Pro version to support the Free version as a sort of “Testing Version”. This is how Fedora Linux remains a well-maintained distro, because it is the Testing Branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is in turn supported by IBM.
-- rc primak
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The best solution for me is actually good old no longer supported Picasa3! I use the last version released 3.9.141 (build 259) and it actually works a lot better than any of the newer, costly products.
The big issue with the more recent products is that they don’t support organizing my NAS based photo library well at all. I haven’t found one that isn’t painfully slow (we’re talking make a request then go for lunch while they ponder, slow!). I have over 100,000 digital photos in close to 5,000 folders on my Qnap NAS and Picasa’s cached thumbnails are a very speedy way to find out what I’m looking for.
I don’t do a lot of touchup to my photos, but Picasa’s minimal processing works fine for me.
Many of Picasa’s online features no longer work, but I don’t really need them.
So I’m sticking with Picasa3 for as long as it keeps working.
When it finally dies, I’ll probably just move online with Flickr, which I use for photo sharing and backup to my NAS photo library.
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Thanks for a great article! I have used Photoshop almost since it first came out, courtesy of the company I worked for. I remember when Adobe sent out the first “survey” to ask users for their opinion about going to a subscription basis. I strongly objected then, not realizing that Adobe had already made up their mind to change. It was a well-planned migration to fa ull subscription basis that followed the “frog in the pot” model. And now the pot is boiling and, hopefully, we all jumped out in time. I still have an old copy of Adobe Acrobat XI Pro which I can install from the Adobe site–still, after all these years. How much longer will that work?
I, also, have installed and use Paint Shop Pro. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it covers my needs, oftern if ways Photoshop and Lightroom didn’t. I have also found several free or inepensive alternatives to Acrobat so my need for Adobe is becoming less and less. As time goes on, I expect that there will be even more alternatives without the subscripton burden required for using Adobe products.
Thanks Will for stirring the pot for all of us!!
Alan Christie, retired computer hobbiest
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My Acrobat X Pro has expire over a year ago. described by Adobe support as “server no longer active” for validation. I have searched for alternatives, but found nothing in the perpetual license or free universe. Can you recommend a replacement for Acrobat Pro?
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In terms of full-featured PDF software, for years I used and recommended Foxit PDF. The last time I checked, it was still possible to buy a permanent license, but in recent years they have been pushing the subscription model very hard and I have since moved on to PDF-XChange, which is also full-featured and doesn’t (yet) try to steer the customer toward subscription dependence.
Both of these are considerably less expensive than Acrobat, although Foxit has gotten increasingly pricey over time. PDF-XChange Editor is IMHO the best buy on the PDF editor market out there.
There is also PDFgear, a newer product with a quirky but usable interface. It’s free for now, though the developers promise that that won’t last forever. 🙂
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At this point, I’m particularly interested in a feature like PSE’s Organizer. Perusing Paint Shop Pro’s website, I cannot find such a feature mentioned, but it seems so basic to an app that seems designed to compete with Lightroom that to be certain I must ask if there is one?
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After a huge effort recording macros on a dedicated keyboard to run Adobe Acrobat 11. One day Adobe 11 was “turned off.” It was NOT purchased on a subscription. They just turned it off. Caused no end of grief. The new Adobe Acrobat has a GUI which is hopeless. The symbology for the actions are horrible, hard to recall, and not intuitive. Does Adobe care? No.
LongBeachCPA 12-09-241 user thanked author for this post.
I cannot find such a feature mentioned
PSP does have organizational capabilities. And it can deal with sidecar files for RAW files and claims compatibility with Lightroom in this regard. I’m not yet facile with this aspect of PSP, although I did some tests with my brother’s help to better understand if PSP would be suitable for my digitization work.
There is a facility for adding tags. I’m not yet sure how that works.
My brother is big on the metadata issue because we are both digitizing film, which has almost zero metadata unless paper records were kept (even notes on slide boxes). He wanted to be sure I had the means to work with metadata. That’s one reason I used PSE – to be able to tag and categorize images. But the Adobe Organizer maintains that organization in its own database. I’ve moved that from system to system with difficulty, but I’d prefer less reliance on such a database.
So, I prefer my own organization at the file system level. For years I used the now-defunct ThumbsPlus program from Cerious Software. The PSP Navigation tab does something similar. That’s an attractive plus.
I hope to write more on this topic in the future, including the results I obtain in capturing digital versions of analog assets with PSP and explanations of how PSP handles RAW files. My brother firmly believes that all digitization should be done by taking RAW files because those provide the greatest opportunity for excellent results with editing. Because RAW files (and HDR file) can be so large, he’s putting 12TB hard drives into his brand-new PC build this Christmas.
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Adobe installs tends to take over a system and consider itself the only application the user should be running.
In the pro world, there is some merit to that approach. Throwing resources at a problem provides increased performance, which can be important to a pro’s workflow.
But I agree that casual users don’t need that. I think Adobe does, too, because while Photoshop can be a hog, Photoshop Elements isn’t. My only complaint about Elements’ performance is the time it takes for the catalog to initialize in the Organizer.
Can you recommend a replacement for Acrobat Pro?
No. If you find one, let us all know.
… DaVimci Resolve can offer a free product with so many good features, is that enough people pay for the Pro version to support the Free version …
I take your point, with the following observations.
DaVinci is not a company. DaVinci Resolve is a product from the company Blackmagic Design.
Blackmagic sells production-grade cinema equipment to the movie industry, at substantial margins. Giving away Resolve costs the company nothing, especially if it works as a loss leader. There is probably more profit in the hardware than in Resolve Pro.
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… there is no revenue stream to insure future availability, support or development.
This is an investment issue that has been around since I was a stock analyst in the early ’90s – how to generate recurring revenue. It remains a deterrent to investment in software development unless the company is already large. The number of companies making packaged software apps is a fraction of what it was in the ’80s and ’90s, as investors began to realize this reality and venture capital dried up.
Will Fastie posted: “At the same time, I’ve been gearing up for film-digitization work. My brother has been encouraging me to subscribe to Lightroom because it has many features that support such tasks. I’ve been reluctant to accept that subscription because I don’t want to have a lot of metadata in catalogs to which I’ll lose access if the subscription lapses. I’ve been looking for alternatives.”
Actually, Will, Adobe’s subscription model for Lightroom Classic is the same as they’re implementing for PSE. If you discontinue your $10 a month subscription to the Photography Plan, which includes Lightroom Classic, Lightroom in the cloud, Photoshop, Bridge, and Adobe Camera Raw–for photographers using this software daily, it’s a bargain–for occasional or rare users, a subscription is harder to justify), but anyway, if you stop subscribing, you don’t lose your Lightroom Classic metadata, same as PSE. You lose access to Lightroom Classic’s Develop module, so you can’t make *new* edits to photos, like tone, color, etc. You can still print and view your images with the edits you made as a subscriber, export them to other apps, access them via keywords, and so on. It’s a common myth that you lose everything, including your photos. No… you just can’t do new editing. Adobe’s photo file formats, DNG and PSD, can easily be read by many other apps if you leave Adobe. And you can export files as JPGs or TIFs with your edits applied and then work on them more in other apps after quitting your Adobe subscription.
Now it may be different if you’re using Lightroom in the cloud, which unlike Lightroom Classic doesn’t have a catalog feature where photos must be imported first; I don’t use that one so don’t know how it works if you discontinue your subscription. For many photographers, the catalog and metadata parts of Lightroom Classic and Bridge (the catalog system for Photoshop users) are a big part of what they do better than competitors.
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I will also add that when Adobe first went to a subscription model for Lightroom Classic and Photoshop years ago, I said no way am I paying a subscription fee for something I already paid for and held steady on my “lifetime” licenses to Lightroom 6.14 and Photoshop 6 (the last “permament” license versions) and avoided subscribing because I thought that Adobe would lose their incentive to innovate, as others have said here.
I was wrong. After several years, I got a new camera and tried out Adobe under the $10 a month subscription plan and was astounded at how much better Lightroom and Photoshop had gotten, with new features I use daily that save me a lot of editing time. And they’ve continued to improve with new features. Adobe is pushing competitors hard on AI, with a two-year lead on most of them. I use elements of it frequently, not to insert something that doesn’t belong (like an elephant at Yellowstone’s Old Faithful), but to remove distractions and leave the background looking very clean. I have other photo apps that do this as well, but Adobe is still the best at it, partly because of their lead in developing it that other apps are responding to.
I also have a “permanent” license to the latest version of DxO PhotoLab, software that to date has not been offered via subscription. DxO has fallen seriously behind competitors in features that matter to me. They don’t have anywhere near the dev funding that Adobe puts towards photography. DxO still does a few things I need better than Adobe, but if I had to choose one or the other, it would be an Adobe subscription. Of course many other photographers see this the other way around, so your mileage may vary. Upgrading DxO every year or two (which is optional, but gets you some improvements, and I do want to support DxO and help keep them going) is roughly comparable to subscribing to Adobe Photography Plan, cost-wise. The full version buy-in for DxO PhotoLab is priced closer to subscribing to Adobe for two years.
Anyway this idea that going to a subscription model will make a company lazy in innovation while getting people to pay for specific upgrade features with new standalone licenses means a product advances more efficiently, driven by the market… not necessarily!
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Subscription vs Purchase? Service vs Product? Consumable vs Non-consumable?
If I subscribe to a magazine, I get new creative content with each issue. If I subscribe to a streaming service, I get to view new content every month. If I pay for electricity every month, power is delivered every month. The efforts of the seller are earning cash flow each month for the service or product delivered. I would characterize these as “consumables”. I’m fine with this.
If I purchase say a power tool, I get a product that has an extended life. It may have wear and tear that shortens its usefulness, but I own it to use as long as it lasts or serves my needs. The manufacturer earns my money by creating a useful and durable product. This I would characterize as “non-consumable”. Unfortunately, companies that made well engineered, long lasting, durable products found themselves not selling enough product when the products lasted too long. Enter “planned obsolescence” which has led to poorly made products and the throw-away economy.
Software used to fall more in the “product” category rather than the “service” category. New versions were sold because of new features and functionality. The last ten or fifteen years has seen an acceleration of SaS (software as a “service”) and making many things that are actually “products” into essentially a subscription. You want to turn on the heated seats in your BMW? Subscribe! ( https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html )
Coupon clipping? Passive income? Maybe not entirely, but the trend is slowly enuring us to accept this as normal.
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
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Hopefully it will continue to exist but I’m not certain I believe that will be the case.
PaintShop Pro was acquired from JASC in 2004. Video Studio Pro was acquired from Ulead (Taiwanese company) in 2006. Then in 2012, Pinnacle systems was acquired. All three of these products continue to be available and continue to be developed. Corel was rebranded to Alludo two years ago, but there is no indication that any of these products will be discontinued. (As a former user of Pinnacle Studio, I wouldn’t shed any tears if that came to an end.)
So on its own, Corel contributed to significant consolidation of the “consumer” grade graphics products without actually eliminating any of them. In the broader market, other products bit the dust. A significant case is Movie Studio Platinum, baby brother to Vegas. I consider it outstanding, but it competes with another video editor from Magix.
So for the moment, it’s hard to see the Corel products fading away. If I thought that, I would not be contemplating this change. Also, if I discover even more ways that PSP is superior to PSE, I’d be hard pressed to think it would not survive.
And now we have PSE turning into a subscription product, with comments here expressing concern that this will reduce or eliminate ongoing innovation.
KKR, the investment banker, owns Corel/Alludo. It paid one billion to acquire Corel, thus making it a private company. Think KKR isn’t paying attention?
For many photographers, the catalog and metadata parts of Lightroom Classic and Bridge are a big part of what they do better than competitors.
My brother would agree with you. I’m not convinced.
… for occasional or rare users, a subscription is harder to justify
There is a pending FTC complaint in California regarding Adobe’s early termination fees. As it stands now, any Adobe Cloud subscription is for a year even if the buyer thinks it’s monthly. I thought the Photography plan would work for me on a monthly basis, but there really isn’t a monthly basis.
For many photographers, the catalog and metadata parts of Lightroom Classic and Bridge are a big part of what they do better than competitors.
My brother would agree with you. I’m not convinced.
… for occasional or rare users, a subscription is harder to justify
There is a pending FTC complaint in California regarding Adobe’s early termination fees. As it stands now, any Adobe Cloud subscription is for a year even if the buyer thinks it’s monthly. I thought the Photography plan would work for me on a monthly basis, but there really isn’t a monthly basis.
The FTC is right, and they’re not the first ones to call Adobe out on that one. There’s no good reason a “monthly” subscription should obligate a customer for 12 entire months their first year… with the exception, of course, of a corporate goal of maximizing revenue. This is in Adobe’s interest; not the consumer’s.
To be clear about how Adobe operates here, because every software company offering subscriptions handles this differently: subscribe to an Adobe app or combo plan, and you get a 7-day free trial (after entering a credit card number, of course) to be sure it works with your hardware and does what you want. Cancel within 7 days, and you have no further obligation other than deleting the Adobe app. OK. But after seven days, they start billing you monthly, and if you cancel before a year is up, they’re entitled to keep billing you for 12 months after your start date even though you’ve canceled, or you can pay a one-time buyout fee which, whaddya know, just happens to be your balance due of the remaining 1-11 months you haven’t paid yet for your first year. This has jammed up many Adobe subscribers who did not understand when they signed on that a monthly subscription really doesn’t mean a monthly subscription that first year, but rather an annual subscription billed monthly. Yes it’s spelled out in terms of service, but go figure, many people miss it. After a year, an Adobe subscription can be canceled on a monthly basis. No pro-rated refund for a month in which you cancel, but they do stop billing you for additional months going forward.
And I agree that this is another good example of Adobe misleading customers, as was hiding-the-salami on this transition to a subscription model for PSE by saying that just because they don’t automatically renew you (gee, thanks–in any fair universe, companies wouldn’t be allowed to do that unless a customer opted into it), it’s not a subscription when key features expire when a customer stops paying; of course it is. I’m not a total Adobe fanboy. But I do like their photo software!
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ON1 Photo RAW 2025
One time payment. Works as a standalone app. Activation on 2 computers.
$49.99 thru 12-9
above copied from On 1 site. Price is for 2 computersI have had an old on 1 copy of ON1 this old computer for years. I also have photo shop CS6 suite on this computer (Win 7). It still works fine. I photo edit with Bridge and PS6.
On1 works similar to PS 6 but at a very low cost. You can renew annually or when you want. I can record in RAW format on my Canon camera and edit it in ON1.1 user thanked author for this post.
Here’s a good example why I avoid Adobe – a topic brought up this summer https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/adobe-users-revolt-over-updated-terms-of-use/
I’ve been a long time customer of Adobe Photoshop and Elements until they started to take control that goes beyond annoying. My Adobe Photoshop 7 released in 2002 runs great with the Win7. PSE 14 is there too. But that was then. Now they’ve run a good product into the ground with their new versions with a subscription, plus it’s crazy getting compatibility when a new Mac OS comes along. Affinity is ok, but it isn’t as user friendly in my opinion. Stuck with the old, and that’s fine. If it works, don’t switch.
MacOS iPadOS and sometimes SOS
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Really appreciate the heads up.
Subscription don’t make sense when you use a product only randomly throughout the year. Some products work just fine as they are, updates not necessary. Seams like Microsoft helped start all this subscription stuff, higher costs, less service and less concern for their end user. Just a way to grab more money from the users for the same old service. Seams like a busines system that’s driven solely by short term cooperate greed & executives that don’t value their software users.
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A question about Organizer…
I’m in a situation similar to others here – I have upgraded Elements every few years over the last 20-odd years as enough new features accumulated to be useful to me. This new “subscription” model holds no appeal for me at all and I am happy with the 2023 version I’m currently using. With luck it will serve me well for many more years!
That said, the main reason I’ve used the software has been for the Organizer. I can imagine it’s not the best in class, I can see how clunky it is, it’s a resource hog, and yes, I find it frustrating at times, but it’s what I started using 20 years ago so I’m used to it. What are the alternatives? Some say Lightroom, but that’s a subscription again, right? Any other choices? I’d like to be able to search and organize by person, date, location, etc. and do it easily without giving Google all my photos (and paying for the pleasure)…
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This new “subscription” model holds no appeal for me
Nor I.
I have upgraded Elements every few years …
The question is total cost of ownership. If you have been upgrading every three years, you’ve been paying $33 per year. That’s exactly what Adobe is asking for the three-year term.
… the main reason … has been for the Organizer.
Adobe says that when the term is up, you won’t be able to use Photoshop or Premiere Elements, but you will still be able to use the organizer.
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Seems like Microsoft helped start all this subscription stuff …
Microsoft released Office 365 three months before Adobe released Creative Cloud (CC) in 2011. The difference was that it was still possible buy the boxed version of Office (which is still available), while Adobe made a clean break.
Thus, I attribute the start of subscriptions primarily to Adobe, although other companies, especially those with specialized products, had been using some sort of subscription or key or mandatory maintenance contract for years before that. AutoCAD also switched to subs in 2011, although it had used a licensing server for years before that.
But Adobe was the most visible, probably because the total cost of ownership jumped a lot. Creative Suite (CS) had a wide variety of versions, but the average was around $1,250. My clients using CS updated about every three years – they were pros wanting those productivity-enhancing features. CC began at $50 per month, which translates into $1,800 for three years at that time. Quite a jump. Of course, CC is now $60/month ($2,160).
2011 was thus a seminal year for subscriptions.
If you really want to wind the clock back, recall that it was almost impossible to buy an IBM mainframe computer outright – the company leased everything starting in the ’50s.
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I suppose I can just keep using the 2023 one as well.
I wish I had confidence that would be true. It was certainly true in the past, but all the components of Elements (Laucher, PSE, PRE, and Organizer) phone home when run. I think Adobe is in control here, regrettably.
I remain curious about alternatives
I wish I could give you an unequivocal answer.
Subscription vs Purchase? Service vs Product? Consumable vs Non-consumable?
If I subscribe to a magazine, I get new creative content with each issue. If I subscribe to a streaming service, I get to view new content every month. If I pay for electricity every month, power is delivered every month. The efforts of the seller are earning cash flow each month for the service or product delivered. I would characterize these as “consumables”. I’m fine with this.
If I purchase say a power tool, I get a product that has an extended life. It may have wear and tear that shortens its usefulness, but I own it to use as long as it lasts or serves my needs. The manufacturer earns my money by creating a useful and durable product. This I would characterize as “non-consumable”. Unfortunately, companies that made well engineered, long lasting, durable products found themselves not selling enough product when the products lasted too long. Enter “planned obsolescence” which has led to poorly made products and the throw-away economy.
Software used to fall more in the “product” category rather than the “service” category. New versions were sold because of new features and functionality. The last ten or fifteen years has seen an acceleration of SaS (software as a “service”) and making many things that are actually “products” into essentially a subscription. You want to turn on the heated seats in your BMW? Subscribe! ( https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html )
Coupon clipping? Passive income? Maybe not entirely, but the trend is slowly enuring us to accept this as normal.
The problem with your reasoning is the business model for software.
There’s only so many features that can be added to any software to make upgrades compelling.
SaaS has more in common with leasing cars or office equipment than it does with magazine and tv subscriptions. And before the PC revolution, this is how companies used software.
Some 20 years ago, at PCExpo, I approached the Microsoft booth and asked for compelling reasons to recommend that my clients upgrade from Office 2000 to Office 2003 (or maybe it was 95 or 97 to 2000, I can’t remember).
The trendy word at the time was “collaboration,” which was a bit less abstract than Lotus Notes’ selling proposition, which no one could ever explain clearly, so all the answers I got from Microsoft staff revolved around that. After explaining to them that the vast majority of users would gain absolutely nothing from that, it was clear that there was no reason to spend tens of thousands of dollars upgrading large deployments, and some of the people I spoke with reluctantly admitted so much.
The bottom line was, as it is now, that Office had become a mature product and, if anything, all that was really necessary were bug fixes, which aren’t free for the company behind any product.
Smart IT managers also started, around that time, to “skip” versions, further challenging the existing business model.
Before the reinvention of “the cloud,” the idea of rented software would’ve fallen flat, even thought that was the business model in place prior to the PC revolution, but now that the road has been paved with a new name for an ancestral idea, the market has embraced it, of course, and since software developers make tools that users literally depend on, resistance is futile.
In light of the above, leased software is the only viable path for software vendors. For them, it ensures a predictable revenue stream, far more profitable than the previous business model, and for users, hopefully, it ensures that bugs are taken care of, and the practice of costly “upgrades” that in reality are little more than bug fixes will be a thing of the past.
The software market is possibly the only one in which free products aren’t a threat to non-free ones. In some cases because of very strong marketing and in others because free alternatives fall short.
Unfortunately for cheap users like myself, perpetual licenses are a death sentence for mature products, so leasing (that’s what it is, regardless of what flashy term is used) is the only option that guarantees survival in this industry (and support for users). Yes, there’s the open-source model but, in all honestly, I don’t see anyone becoming a billionaire in that segment.
At this point, it looks like the issue at hand is not really leased vs. owned, but predatory vs. non-predatory practices and my guess, if competitors arise in this arena, is that the evolution of leased software will closely follow what we’ve seen happen in the phone and tv industries, going from yearly contracts to month-to-month with a number of incentives to pre-pay full years. All this, assuming that users react loudly and clearly to Adobe’s (and others’) abuse of power.
Adobe shares suffer steepest drop in over two years on disappointing revenue guidance
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… which may explain some of the motivation behind moving Photoshop Elements to a subscription pricing model …
The Elements line is small potatoes compared to the rest of the product portfolio.
… and may portend monthly price increases for Adobe app subscribers
That makes sense.
I won’t use ANY paid software for which there is a free alternative
I don’t object to paying for software. Developers must eat and companies must profit. I object only to being locked in.
In some cases, there is no freedom of choice. Almost all the companies to which I consulted required Microsoft Office-compatible documents. It was far safer and more reliable to use Microsoft Office rather than an alternative because I could be sure there would be no document compatibility issues.
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I don’t subscribe to Office 365. I’m retired, not generally collaborating, and have needs in text and spreadsheet documents only that are very basic, so I use and donate annually to freeware LibreOffice. BUT for about six months a couple of years ago, I was collaborating with two guys who did use Office (not 365 but an earlier standalone version, maybe 2007?, which I didn’t have, and they didn’t want to learn LO) on a book, and man oh man, was it a compatibility nightmare in terms of formatting. This book had photos interspersed with the text, and every time text was edited near a photo, yikes, very unpredictable and could take a lot of effort to untangle and get looking right again. LO promises compatibility with Office. Don’t believe it. If you need to work on a team, everyone should be on the same page and app.
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… surely this is a red herring.
I used WordPerfect exclusively from 1979 to roughly 1999. But as I began to engage in more and more corporate consulting, using Word became mandatory. I’m a maven at using both, meaning I use advanced features all the time, and I can tell you that documents were not directly compatible despite vendor claims. While I was using paper, it didn’t matter. But once I was digital, it was far easier and more productive to assure perfect compatibility by using the same software as my clients. That’s still true for me today, although I’m no longer doing that Fortune 1000 consulting.
I still prefer WordPerfect because I think it’s always been better than Word, so I still use it for personal work. I’m not saying everyone should do that – I have no bone to pick with making a choice on a personal basis.
But my article was not about free or open-source options. It was about the vendors’ business models. I’m saying I’m tired of the subscription model in many cases (not all) and I’m looking for perpetual options that match the subscription products in quality and feature.
Super-secret revelation: I’ll probably sign up for the Elements subscription for at least three years, perhaps a year or so from now. That’s because Web clients (and my artist) hand me PSD (Photoshop) and AI (Illustrator) files all the time, which Photoshop elements can read perfectly (getting all the layers right). But I’m learning to use PaintShop Pro Ultimate for my personal and AskWoody work and hoping Corel/Alludo will not succumb.
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Interesting. Adobe’s fourth-quarter revenue beat expectations, but its guidance for 2025 came in lower than analysts predicted, and that’s why the stock tumbled. Weird. Of course if they then come in better than their 2025 guidance, the stock may bounce right back.
But there was also this from the CNBC story, which may explain some of the motivation behind moving Photoshop Elements to a subscription pricing model and may portend monthly price increases for Adobe app subscribers (prices for some non-Photography Plan apps increased earlier this year, IIRC):
The stock is now down 20% for the year, badly trailing the Nasdaq, which is up 33%
And sure enough, two days ago, the dangling shoe dropped in the face of financial headwinds for Adobe and in line with what’s happening with PSE. Adobe raised some (not all; some increased earlier this year) subscription prices on other plans including flagship photo apps. The Photography Plan including Lightroom Classic, Lightroom in the cloud, Photoshop, and some others, with minimal cloud storage (20 GB), which has been $9.95 a month since I believe someone said 2013, even before some apps were added, will no longer be available to new subscribers effective January 15, 2025. As I’ve said, it’s a bargain for heavy users, as many photographers like me are. Not so much for occasional users, especially those who go months without using any of the apps.
Legacy subscribers like me will be allowed to continue on the plan, however, if they want to pay only in effect $10 per month, they must pay and subscribe annually for just under $120, starting when they reach the annual anniversary date of the onset of their subscription. Or if monthly payment is how they prefer to go, they can pay monthly at $15 per month (the default option if the subscriber makes no change to the subscription). Or they can subscribe for in effect $20 per month with more cloud storage, as Adobe clearly wants all their Photo Plan subscribers to do, because then it’s harder to leave with TBs of photos in the Adobe cloud (a hard pass for me). If their subscription lapses, they will not be allowed to pick it up again without choosing a more expensive plan.
Adobe does continue adding AI-based features. They’ve just added one, in Camera Raw, soon coming to Lightroom, which is very effective at removing reflections in glass, as in street-scene store windows, or aquarium tanks. Eye popping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YJXJTJPHlw
As usual with Adobe, the subscription plan changes are more complicated and confusing than they need to be. Sow confusion, count on many people not paying careful attention, reap more revenue.
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At this point, it looks like the issue at hand is not really leased vs. owned, but predatory vs. non-predatory practices..
As a company gains preeminence in a market or product niche, the temptation to be predatory sometimes wins out, unfortunately. I pay for a number of software subscriptions and will continue to do so as long as I am treated with respect: high quality, good customer support, lack of any ‘dark pattern’ manipulations, no in-software advertising or nag-ware, no data-mining, good privacy and so on. And if I get these from ‘free’ software, I will support them via donations if I rely on the software regularly.
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
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Related bad news: Premiere Elements 2019, with its perpetual license, will RUN on Windows 11 but will not INSTALL on Windows 11. (It tells you you have the wrong kind of web browser, and none of Adobe’s suggested workarounds have worked for me; the final word from them is that it’s not supposed to work.)
The only way to run it under 11 is to install under 10 and then upgrade the computer.
This kept me from continuing to use one of my Premiere Elements 2019 licenses when I got a new computer. It is not due to any technical limitation of Premiere Elements 2019.
Not well done, Adobe. I don’t edit videos often and don’t want to have to learn a more complicated package.
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