About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation fee will really help our retention, which will look really good on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will do amazing things for our revenue."
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
There seems to be a perception in big companies that if you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit possible.
You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you create an opportunity for competitors.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base.
It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The previous decade it only grew 3x.
I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely still add features all the time. For example, they just added a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe is doing nothing.
CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep running long after the company collapses on my offline PC that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that one Adobe!
It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to actually perform innovation. So while competition is not necessary for growth, it clearly often helps.
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance,
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
I tried switching to Affinity. I'm glad it exists. I use Affinity Designer but Affinity Photo didn't meet my needs and I ended up signing up for a Photoshop subscription. It was small workflow stuff but ultimately, for me needs, some poor UX choices in Affinity meant editing 200+ files would have taking 2-3 hours more. Photoshop was $120 for a 1yr subscription. My time is easily worth more than $120 for the 2-3 hours I saved.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Anecdotally, they seem to be doing some subtle shenanigans around the install and activatiom of CS versions that still require it (4-6 iirc).
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
Once the infrastructure and social acceptance was there to allow for subscription based pricing, the bost benefit ratio shifted enough that the benefit of those people using Adobe products at home that weren't paid for changed, since they could now get the specific products they needed for a small fee that only lasted a short while.
I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the early 00’s and everyone had pirated software. And then we all got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools we knew so well.
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.
I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new features.
Yep, I finally cancelled and didn’t take any of the “two free months” offer because I just don’t trust their billing approach anymore. The “pay monthly but can’t cancel for one year” model ruined it.
For after effects they offered monthly, monthly with commitment and annual. Same pricing structure as a gym. I guess they need to make it clear but it was clear to me that a cancellation fee applied.
I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental software crap.
I refuse to pay monthly for this software.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
<sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load in Edge, which is where we work.
Figma’s pricing is extremely exploitative too, it’s essentially designed in a way were trivial actions can instantiate new subscription seats that have to be manually removed.
The idea of "use it at work" may have change drastically with the advent of social media. Nowadays, anyone can become a content creator[1], thereby making their home a place of work. This shift in trend may have compelled Adobe to pursue revenue from individual users, albeit rather aggressively.
[1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation strongly affiliated with that industry.
That was the best most companies could do before SaaS. Now that we live in a SaaS era, it's much easier and acceptable for corps like Adobe to minimize piracy and increase revenue with subscriptions.
This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.
This is exactly right -- Adobe wanted people to pirate Photoshop at home because they knew it wasn't realistic for a lot of home users to pay for an entire Photoshop license upfront. Back in 2010, that was a whopping $700 [1].
SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.
Somewhat reminds me of netflix's policy on sharing accounts. The CEO used to straight up say they don't care, and it's not really feasible to enforce account-sharing rules. Fast forward to today, and they "figured out" how to enforce it.
I've not really done enough with "real" photography to have strong opinions on this, but Aftershot (which was included in a Humble Bundle a few years ago) has been ok for the stuff I used it for.
I've been using Exposure for many years, but it seems like it might be dying/dead - they haven't released an update in a long time, YT and social media accounts are quiet etc.
If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because it's missing file/library management and layers.
I've been quite happy with my switch to Capture One. They offer subscription and one-off purchases. I haven't seen the need to upgrade since my initial purchase. The Capture ONE RAW engine also seems to produce better results for my Fuji than Lightroom.
VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in production and keep licensing issues to warnings.
The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky describes the fall of Behance, the fall of Adobe’s perpetual licensing, and the rise of their cloud subscription offering.
I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting the many millions he made aside.
An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement Adobe’s perception as a must-have for business. If you worked in that space at all, it was super common to have things like Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro for sone proprietary feature which didn’t exist in the alternatives.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
They also relied on schools when I was going through school, even before the free license for students offers. My schools would get cheap or free use of office suite, windows, and adobe creative suite, we'd all learn to do our class work on them (or have multimedia elective essentially being 'learn adobe creative suite' class), pirate them for home use, and have it even more entrenched for doing actual work with. Considering when I started at school, computers for student use for my whole school could be counted on one hand and they only had word perfect or something on them, they adapted to that particular changing landscape amazingly.
First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
> the last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom
Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
I learned Photoshop on pirated copies. However, as a young professional that couldn't risk any of the malarkey involved with relying on an outdated, pirated tool cracked with a program written and compiled by who knows, I needed a real license-- that's especially true because PDFs were a major vector for malware infections at that point. However, I also could not afford to spend many hundreds of dollars upfront on their products! When they introduced the CC subscription, it was a an absolute lifesaver. Especially for hobby users or professionals with low-collaboration or less involved use cases, it's easily more expensive over the life of the software. But for people that consistently need the latest features in any number of their programs, it's actually a lot better.
(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)
I removed the last vestiges of Adobe products from my machine a few years ago. It took a while to find all the little bits of cruft and licensing daemons that had been spewed all over my Mac by their installers. What a mess.
Presumably after a while that didn't ring true. I've worked at at least one company where an engineer flat out pirated the software he used, and I'd say all others have been a bit lax with the terms of the licence
When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.
Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big difference today is that instead of people returning to the high seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
> When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.
This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They always launch at a good value because they know they can capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster fucks.
They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product line because they need full adoption before they can put the screws to you.
Or you do what everyone else does, which is force everyone to adopt the SaaS model by revoking their licenses or otherwise bricking the software.
That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later. You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone wants their own launcher and subscription services.
And we keep falling for it, too. Folks on HN and elsewhere are fawning over Fusion360, despite Autodesk having a long history of being worse than Adobe and pulling the rug on individual features more than once.
People spend thousands of dollars on 3D printers or CNC mills, but the idea of spending several hundred bucks on "buy-to-own" software is so outmoded...
The other reason you have all these subscription models is that they obscure the total cost of ownership. Spending $300 on photo editing software seems like a big commitment. Paying $20/mo for a decade is easier. But when you add up Creative Suite, Office365, Xbox Game Pass, Spotify, Netflix, Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of your disposable income.
Every corporate leader has the opportunity to "bring value" to the company by upping the subscription fee a few dollars. Profits increase, shareholders are happy. Better than trying to solve twenty year old bugs or worse, refactor legacy code.
agree but I would reverse the cause and effect.. launch great experience on the web+cloud to gain traction.. then Because it is so Easy to Do It, change the terms of service, the benefits, the longevity, the billing practices, the prices.. etc
IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways they ran rough over their former "friend" )
For people who hate or simply can't justify the subscriptions, big shout out to Affinity suite v2. Currently 50% off at $83, permanent universal license for Mac/Windows/iPad
That includes Photo/Designer/Publisher, which are competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign respectively.
It's not a drop-in replacement and if you're collaborating with other people who are in Adobe-land then you'll need to stick with Adobe too. But for people who occasionally need an image editor for solo work and have been priced out of all the Adobe products, it's a solid option.
One caveat is they're now owned by Canva, things haven't gone to shit yet but they might in the future.
Another caveat is that if your workflow requires dealing with complex text layout on a regular basis (e.g., Asian languages), Affinity suite support for it is pretty much non-existent. For example, lack of a working right-to-left support, no vertical text support for CJK, broken tone markers handling in Thai layout, lack of complex word-break for any languages that is not space-based, etc.
Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.
And that cost per month is for a 12 month contract that if you try to cancel early will require you to pay 1/2 of the remaining contract to get out of it. You cancel on day 32... that'll be 5.5 x your monthly payment to cancel.
Adobe makes all of this insanely hard to understand and fully grasp as a consumer. It's also almost completely unique in software licensing. I tried to find out when my current 'contract' was up a couple months ago and it was nowhere in their website account section nor in the Adobe Creative Cloud app on my PC that I could find. I had to call them and wait something like 30 minutes on hold to find out.
I wound up getting an extremely discounted rate for a year, but I now know the date it will end and have set reminders to cancel before and have begun transitioning to DaVinci Resolve now and will start transitioning to Affinity soon.
Not for students.
CS6 single product was up to $250, CS6 DS $350, CS6 MC $800 compared to CC 1st year $240 increasing to $360.
If you only needed a single product you were off worse after one year. Even doing a bachelors which required all products would have been less expensive with the one time fee if you had the money.
Back in the day (a decade ago) you would go to the lab which had Autodesk/Solidworks/Matlab/Adobe/$expensive-software installed instead of buying it for your personal (and probably underpowered) device. It was one of the few things that your tuition actually paid for.
And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you could get your project done on time instead of crunching at the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people who didn't.
They should release a home-user version with some restrictions unpalatable for commercial use - eg. "Can only edit 5 files per month" or "All edited images get non-commercial use licenses attached".
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
I had forgotten that they offer the 'Elements' range where you can buy Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements. These are stripped down versions of the full software, but they are not subscription. You pay once, you own it.
Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per month, and then various things in the software cost a credit each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.
You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying credits to actuallyt operate the software.
Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front.
There could be sales on credits etc.
I've been on the $29.99 full Creative Cloud plan for over 2 years. I got it as a Thanksgiving offer in 2021. Just last month they told me the deal was over and I needed to pay full price. I went to faux-cancel and they gave me 2 free months, but I still need to find a way to get a reduced price again.
> Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it.
Counterpoint - most management teams undersell their sales relative to what the market is willing to pay them. Adobe is figuring out where that local maxima is (still).
> they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
Are they though? Source?
These figures would suggest otherwise:
Year Active Subscribers
2013 1.4 million
2017 12.0 million
2020 19.5 million
2021 22.0 million
2022 24.5 million
2024 29.5 million
For the longest while, Adobe charged Canadians in USD despite having an entirely Canadian version of the site etc. It meant that the price of the software varied each month!
It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
ever again?" type of product.
Nah. Lightroom is/was the primary Adobe product I used. Pretty much the only new features they've ever introduced that meant anything to me revolved around supporting new cameras. At $80 for a perpetual license it was great because I rarely upgrade my camera bodies. Aside from supporting new cameras the only other worthwhile to me feature Adobe's introduced was a 64-bit installer. Yeah, LR 4.4 was a 64-bit app, but the installer remained 32-bit because Adobe is that lazy or greedy.
None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe. Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of upgrading.
Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities, but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly opinionated) user experience.
I was one of those who wasn't supportive back then, because it was pretty clear where things would go from there. They wouldn't switch for a subscription model to earn less money, that was sure.
And being a quasi monopolist meant keeping working with that old CS6 version was less and less of an option. So what are you going to do? Complain? Suck it up?
Even back then it was clear they are going for the slow-warming-the-water temperature-till-it-boils-strategy.
honestly, i found a solution for this. it is a little unethical, but is as unethical as them forcing me to never be able to unsubscribe (there's only a short time where you can unsubscribe once per year). i have a card that i use only for recurring subscriptions, when one of the recurring subscriptions gets problematic, i first block the card (this is important!) and then delete it and create a new one. this way they can not continue to charge me.
if you don't block it, they may be able to use the associated card payment token to charge you even after the card has been deleted. on one of my banks i can even see the associated tokens and delete them individually.
they can sue me, sure, but nobody will do that for 10€/month.
Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.
Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.
Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.
Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.
Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.
After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.
I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?
For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.
I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.
It would be great to see better alternatives someday.
This is true of literally everything in the new economy.
Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
I had T-Mobile starting in ~2003 and it included unlimited tethering.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
It’s a marketing tactic way broader than the “new economy”
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose.
Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
> Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
For Photoshop specifically (and perhaps other CC programs, but I'm less familiar with them) another problem compared to alternatives is that a great wealth of instructional material (tutorials, paid video courses, etc) are built around Photoshop.
While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.
More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
Have you disputed the charge? If the bank is refusing to honor your request, that’s both reason to switch banks and to try small claims court to get your money back.
> Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.
The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.
The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.
The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.
> "Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
If you are stuck in this situation open a chat with support and ask to cancel with the reason "My new employer is paying for my Adobe subscription" to get the cancellation fee waived.
I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at least 3 others I know of
Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in the meantime
> Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off
I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)
Krita is geared towards illustrative work versus photo vs editing/product design. While it can do both, it misses or is behind in several areas
1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing system
2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping and perspective correction
I do really like Krita, and I’ve replaced Photoshop use for illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents me switching myself.
Davinci Resolve is miles better than Premiere. I don't do a lot of compositing, but I know more and more people are starting to use it over After Effects as well.
Resolve is better than Premiere on its own (hence why I list premiere as having competition) but the Fusion compositing is not a comparison for After Effects, but rather for something like Nuke.
While After Effects does some compositing (and it’s decent at it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its’ stronghold is motion graphics. There’s very little other than Cavalry to compete with it.
And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to my edit when using After Effects.
You can also sometimes get it very cheap via random country specific deals. They had one last year for Latvian students. Excecpt it had zero checks in place to ensure you actually were a student. I think I paid something like $4 for a year of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premier, Adobe Stock, etc.
Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to an empty inbox.
I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the last few years.
I get the impression from my friends in the animation industry that Toon Boom’s animation suite pretty much dominates the industry. Flash hung on a while but TB has so many features designed for the particular craft of assembling a small army of people who collaborate on making a moving and talking drawing.
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
Toon Boom’s domination really is very regional. But that’s one reason I list flash as having competitors.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
I don't think there's such a huge gulf between Krita and Photoshop for digital artists. I do work with it professionally all the time, mostly dealing with texture work for CG.
Is that a pro-tip? I mean, I wouldn't give them a penny more for having this attitude towards customers in first place. The real pro-tip at least for me would be to pay once for a product that I can use without being enslaved to a for-life subscription. It really really pisses me off how most commercial software is offered today. F** all that.
You are spot on about Adobe's products not having adequate alternatives. I see a lot of new artists online saying to use Affinity or Gimp, but they do not compare. Even Blender lovers, myself included, who have embraced the open source alternative would be shocked to see what features they are missing compared to the top tier tools like Maya.
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
I tried to block Adobe from automatically billing my account for a monthly fee, Adobe phone support said if I couldn't tell them the email that was billing my bank account, they wouldn't cancel it. I then told the bank to block further billing. Then the billing name started changing on my statement: Adobe -> Adobe Inc. -> Adobe Creative C -> Adobe Stock, so the "new name(s)" didn't get blocked. The bank eventually refunded a portion because I had called the first time. Wonder if the bank would have a claim against Adobe in addition to the FTC?
Can you confirm that all of these transactions were for the same amount, equal to your monthly payment when you were a subscriber? I get that they’re the bad guy, but I highly doubt they have intentionally developed systems to side-step blocks from payment processors. A compromised credit card is a much more likely explanation given your inability to provide the email address for the account and charges for multiple products.
I too doubt it's to sidestep blocks, but it could very much be a case of normal fallbacks.
E.g. if Adobe or a contractor uses one service to process payments, if that API fails they use another service, if that API fails they use another service.
And it shows up as a slightly different name in each case, because it was a different person registering each service, and the names don't need to be consistent anyways.
I set up categorization rules in my personal finance app Monarch and have discovered that exact names of charges vary quite a bit. Always the same two or three variations for a given company, but it might be six months of one, then six months of another, then back to the first...
Threatening to call my state AG and the AG of a company’s incorporating state for fraud has 100% always cut the bullshit and gotten me to rightful resolution when customer service gives me the runaround.
I’ve never had to make the calls. It’s a bluff but the cost of legal compliance to answer AG calls always outweighs the cost of rightful resolution.
they really know what they're doing don't they
I imagine the implementatioin of this as some executive saying "surely we can't get away with that" and then of course, them getting away with that
I haven't used any Adobe products since they started doing the subscription-only model. I want to use it, they typically make good enough software, but I have a line in the sand that I will not pay for a subscription. I want to buy my software and own it and use it for as long as I want.
Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.
I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).
Adobe software isn't quite "good" in my experience. The company is an Oracle: all-in on giving the right bullet points to pointy-haired managers but with a palpable paucity of technical merit.
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
Adobe has let pretty much all of the Macromedia stuff fade out
Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.
Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway
Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
I don't think Vegas has been Sony for quite awhile has it?
Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
I so wish they were a viable option to replace Illustrator for certain printing things. But they just have this slightly different output that the printing house I'm trying to use (Tayda) doesn't jive with.
Oh no question, bad phrasing on my end, I sort of meant it inverted.
Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.
I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.
When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but you've been able to buy each major release outright for ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)
I believe CS6 was the last version of Adobe Animate you could purchase outright. I don't know about their other products as much.
I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that subscriptions are the only way now.
Yeah but they’re getting all the money from everyone else.
Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won’t give them money, good riddance.
That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off. For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.
I mean, sure, there's probably an upper bound of a number I'd pay, and I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying really any amount of money for Photoshop.
For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.
I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.
I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing special for me.
New York Times. Last year I wanted to cancel my Athletic subscription and not only do they use the positively colored buttons to cancel the cancellation flow rather than continue with cancelling, once you get to what seems like a final confirmation, it doesn't show anything to confirm it actually was cancelled. I ended up needing to wait until the next bill date to make sure I wasn't charged again. Their support was useless too.
Several years ago, the only way to cancel was over the phone. Hallmark of scumbag business.
Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)
I was just having a terrible experience trying to uninstall the "Adobe Creative Cloud". I have used it and paid for it. It's full of anti-patterns to make it difficult to uninstall, and now that I don't pay for it any more it just exists on my computer to nag me to renew my subscriptions.
They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.
Audible is similarly bad. The only notification of my 12mth subscription renewal was after it had occurred. If I cancel, I lose any unused credits plus access the the included-in-subscription content immediately. There's no way to cancel auto-renewal - you're either subscribed or you're not. I have a reminder set to cancel close to the renewal date.
I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good in this regard.
I never paid them, but used to receive their mailers.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)
Sirius is easy these days, it’s a 2 minute phone call. They’ll offer a discount rate, decline it, canceled and refunded.
Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
Canceling SiriusXM is pretty easy via phone. Adobe makes the process confusing to make you believe you canceled even you haven't yet. It also charges high cancellation fees and has threatening wording.
I did so at the beginning of last year. I was on and off the phone within 5 minutes and they refunded the last month.
I was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.
It’s not hard at all. In fact, I use an iPhone, and they have an iMessage “service” or whatever it is called where I just text them for account related things. Every year I text them for a discounted renewal on my wife’s car. Last year I cancelled service on my car because I just wasn’t using it often enough. Of course they started offering a discounted price, but when I countered that I’m just not using it, they completed the cancellation without issue. Guess I’ve been lucky.
My dad was accidentally paying 89.99$ a month and hasn't used their service for a year. I cancelled it for him after going through his taxes/finances. They use all sorts of dark UX practices at signup and cancellation.
Honestly there should be a law where if you haven't logged into your account in 3 months you should get a notification asking if you want to cancel. It's one thing if the company is storing your data (like google photos) as that has an associated cost, but inactive accounts just feels like corporate theft.
> There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly subscription service fee for AOL — but instead of dial-up access, these subscribers get technical support and identity theft software.
> The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now “in the low thousands,” according to a source.
In the case of Adobe, it shouldn’t just be whether you’ve logged into the account, because many people will have the Creative Cloud agent software running idle on their computer, continually re-authenticating in the background. The pertinent question is whether you’ve actively used any paid component of the subscription, specifically, opened an application. (To be especially fair, I’d say there should also be at least one document opened where at least one action was performed. Accidentally opening a file and immediately closing it shouldn’t count.)
I've never really understood how someone could "forget" they were paying for something. Like, doesn't everyone check their bank balances and purchase histories at least once a month? Or at least just skim their credit card bills? How do you even make sure you have enough money for things? I have Quicken open pretty much constantly, and refresh at least once a day. Of course not everyone is as anal as me, but you'd think at a bare minimum most people took a peek at their finances once a month? Once a year even? How do people just stay on autopilot for months/years and just wing it?
Once you have enough money it doesn’t matter. You don’t spend time looking at bills. You know roughly that credit card X has a bill of $4-5k a month and as long as it’s close to that why bother. You set an autopay with an upper limit and just never think about it. You rely on things like email notifications to “catch” odd spending. Look at a bill maybe twice a year. You don’t go through line by line, you just look for things that are odd and if nothing stands out you’re done. Maybe you spend 30 minutes a year looking at bills.
Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost opposite reasons. They don’t want to check because it causes anxiety and they feel like they don’t have control anyway.
Not a good habit but I rarely check my credit card statements, I'm lucky enough to be in a situation where money isn't a stressor for me so I just wait for the email that my next statement is ready and pay it off.
To be fair, itemized credit card charges are always formatted so badly and it usually just ends up stressing me out because I see some $83 charge on there for something in all-caps that doesn't look familiar, then I search my emails and figure out what it was and I don't know why they're named like that when the charge is put through.
But man, thank god for this thread because I thought to check just now and I realized my bank didn't email me when my last statement was ready, and I would have been late to pay if I didn't by tomorrow.
It's absolutely easy to forget, though it's especially the case for annual billing. I found out today (from my bank app sending me a spending notification) that I've been paying for a basic Curiosity Stream plan for the past 4 years, with the price slowly rising. Looking back through my emails, I can only find one mentioning a change in my subscription price.
It's fortunately not a huge amount of money in this case (it was the cheapest plan), and they did refund me for this year's renewal, but I was annoyed that a service that I never log into would keep renewing with no notification. Digging through emails, I found two. One from a while back, talking about a change in my subscription, and another talking about changes to their terms of service, which I would expect to get even if I wasn't subscribed.
For as evil as Amazon is, at least you can easily cancel Prime after it auto-renews and get your money back.
I used to. Then at a certain point in my life it was no longer a top priority in my life to run a tight financial ship. This usually happens around the time you invite a partner and children into your life. There’s just too many expenses to question.
I’ll do maybe a yearly audit but apart from that, if nothing seems out of the ordinary, I don’t check.
I only look at the details every few months and rank by descending amount to focus on high ticket items. I have certainly missed some of these subscriptions that only happen once a year. If you have enough savings, small expenses are not always worth chasing down.
I find going through monthly statements quite cumbersome, so instead what works better is to enable notifications for each transaction. That way I just get an email when something is charged to the card, makes it easier to notice unused subscriptions.
>doesn't everyone check their bank balances and purchase histories at least once a month?
Nope. I can be guilty of it as well and I make a habit to cancel reoccurring subscriptions. But if it's not some hundred dollar charge, I don't look too closely in the "good times".
I even use budgeting software and I can fall for this on rare occasions. I have (had) maybe $100 reserved for reocurring subscriptions, so if I see that budget met and don't see any crazy $50/month charges, it just slips through. I overall just see a ballpark expected budget and my savings go up. Small fry slip through.
I can only imagine those unknowingly paying some small amount every month. It's a more realistic version of the whole "steal a penny from every citizen and become a millionaire!" scheme. But now times are harder and I'm calculating finances by the dollar.
Adobe says "Make amazing transformations in seconds with tools powered by Firefly generative AI! Create images with just a few words, unlock endless color combinations, and make eye-popping text effects! You have to try it to believe it! See what generative AI can do for your business!"
Readit News
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
Thank you Harvard Business School.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
[1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
Probably not unintentional.
Ugh, what an egregious misuse of public funds. Maybe they should also check the labels on the employees' clothes, in case of illegal knock-offs.
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.
I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
[1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.
[1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation strongly affiliated with that industry.
if these individual users are deriving commercial revenue from the software, i dont see it as wrong to pursue revenue from them.
This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.
SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.wir...
[2] https://petapixel.com/how-much-is-photoshop/
[3] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html
If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because it's missing file/library management and layers.
[I think you didn't mean 'except']
I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer I've used in the last 15 years.
I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting the many millions he made aside.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)
Dead Comment
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Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big difference today is that instead of people returning to the high seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They always launch at a good value because they know they can capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster fucks.
They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product line because they need full adoption before they can put the screws to you.
That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later. You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone wants their own launcher and subscription services.
People spend thousands of dollars on 3D printers or CNC mills, but the idea of spending several hundred bucks on "buy-to-own" software is so outmoded...
The other reason you have all these subscription models is that they obscure the total cost of ownership. Spending $300 on photo editing software seems like a big commitment. Paying $20/mo for a decade is easier. But when you add up Creative Suite, Office365, Xbox Game Pass, Spotify, Netflix, Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of your disposable income.
IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways they ran rough over their former "friend" )
https://affinity.serif.com/
That includes Photo/Designer/Publisher, which are competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign respectively.
It's not a drop-in replacement and if you're collaborating with other people who are in Adobe-land then you'll need to stick with Adobe too. But for people who occasionally need an image editor for solo work and have been priced out of all the Adobe products, it's a solid option.
One caveat is they're now owned by Canva, things haven't gone to shit yet but they might in the future.
Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.
This is what stops me. I've experienced too many instances of a full version upgrade with a sunset on previous versions.
Adobe makes all of this insanely hard to understand and fully grasp as a consumer. It's also almost completely unique in software licensing. I tried to find out when my current 'contract' was up a couple months ago and it was nowhere in their website account section nor in the Adobe Creative Cloud app on my PC that I could find. I had to call them and wait something like 30 minutes on hold to find out.
I wound up getting an extremely discounted rate for a year, but I now know the date it will end and have set reminders to cancel before and have begun transitioning to DaVinci Resolve now and will start transitioning to Affinity soon.
Software rent seeking. Not even the greatest dystopian sci-fi writers could come up with this one.
It reminds me of the shenanigans that Sirius radio does, esp here in Canada where there is less protections against it.
And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you could get your project done on time instead of crunching at the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people who didn't.
</grumble>
I probably would only have used Photoshop and in two months of my subscription money I could have instead bought/owned Affinity Photo.
I might use Photoshop for a week and then not use it again for 6 months. Did I just pay $120 for that one week?
Renting software will always suck.
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photographers make that subscription fee in 10 minutes?
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop-elements.html
You can actually buy the software, not just rent it.
Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per month, and then various things in the software cost a credit each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.
You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying credits to actuallyt operate the software.
Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front. There could be sales on credits etc.
Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
Sign up for the free trial, then "cancel" you'll get a screen that says "offers" and you can choose a realistic price plan.
Remember to "cancel" before your year is up or else you'll be automatically charged the full price the following month.
Counterpoint - most management teams undersell their sales relative to what the market is willing to pay them. Adobe is figuring out where that local maxima is (still).
> they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
Are they though? Source?
These figures would suggest otherwise:
Year Active Subscribers
https://photutorial.com/adobe-statistics/Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging customers in Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrMhbWG0Pc
None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe. Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of upgrading.
Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities, but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly opinionated) user experience.
And being a quasi monopolist meant keeping working with that old CS6 version was less and less of an option. So what are you going to do? Complain? Suck it up?
Even back then it was clear they are going for the slow-warming-the-water temperature-till-it-boils-strategy.
if you don't block it, they may be able to use the associated card payment token to charge you even after the card has been deleted. on one of my banks i can even see the associated tokens and delete them individually.
they can sue me, sure, but nobody will do that for 10€/month.
Photoshop is $35/mo. If you sign up for a year, it's $23/mo.
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Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.
Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.
Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.
Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.
After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.
I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?
For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.
I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.
It would be great to see better alternatives someday.
Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose. Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
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While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.
More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.
The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.
The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.
> "Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at least 3 others I know of
Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in the meantime
I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)
1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing system
2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping and perspective correction
I do really like Krita, and I’ve replaced Photoshop use for illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents me switching myself.
That used to be true at NYTimes and WaPo. But new WaPo management does the reverse:
With the election coming up, they're determined to raise prices, and they know all they need to about you.While After Effects does some compositing (and it’s decent at it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its’ stronghold is motion graphics. There’s very little other than Cavalry to compete with it.
And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to my edit when using After Effects.
Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to an empty inbox.
I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the last few years.
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
But if we’re limiting it to stuff like illustrations and texturing, it’s very capable. I’ve introduced it in several areas specifically for that.
however for other things like photo retouching and product design, Photoshop has a pretty wide moat at the moment
1. Get 50% off for 3 months
2. Get access to only Photoshop for the same price
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
I wish
E.g. if Adobe or a contractor uses one service to process payments, if that API fails they use another service, if that API fails they use another service.
And it shows up as a slightly different name in each case, because it was a different person registering each service, and the names don't need to be consistent anyways.
I set up categorization rules in my personal finance app Monarch and have discovered that exact names of charges vary quite a bit. Always the same two or three variations for a given company, but it might be six months of one, then six months of another, then back to the first...
I’ve never had to make the calls. It’s a bluff but the cost of legal compliance to answer AG calls always outweighs the cost of rightful resolution.
Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.
I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.
Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway
Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.
Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.
I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.
When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but you've been able to buy each major release outright for ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)
I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that subscriptions are the only way now.
Yeah but they’re getting all the money from everyone else.
Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won’t give them money, good riddance.
For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.
I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.
Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)
They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.
I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good in this regard.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)
Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
I was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.
Honestly there should be a law where if you haven't logged into your account in 3 months you should get a notification asking if you want to cancel. It's one thing if the company is storing your data (like google photos) as that has an associated cost, but inactive accounts just feels like corporate theft.
> There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly subscription service fee for AOL — but instead of dial-up access, these subscribers get technical support and identity theft software.
> The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now “in the low thousands,” according to a source.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost opposite reasons. They don’t want to check because it causes anxiety and they feel like they don’t have control anyway.
To be fair, itemized credit card charges are always formatted so badly and it usually just ends up stressing me out because I see some $83 charge on there for something in all-caps that doesn't look familiar, then I search my emails and figure out what it was and I don't know why they're named like that when the charge is put through.
But man, thank god for this thread because I thought to check just now and I realized my bank didn't email me when my last statement was ready, and I would have been late to pay if I didn't by tomorrow.
It's fortunately not a huge amount of money in this case (it was the cheapest plan), and they did refund me for this year's renewal, but I was annoyed that a service that I never log into would keep renewing with no notification. Digging through emails, I found two. One from a while back, talking about a change in my subscription, and another talking about changes to their terms of service, which I would expect to get even if I wasn't subscribed.
For as evil as Amazon is, at least you can easily cancel Prime after it auto-renews and get your money back.
I’ll do maybe a yearly audit but apart from that, if nothing seems out of the ordinary, I don’t check.
Nope. I can be guilty of it as well and I make a habit to cancel reoccurring subscriptions. But if it's not some hundred dollar charge, I don't look too closely in the "good times".
I even use budgeting software and I can fall for this on rare occasions. I have (had) maybe $100 reserved for reocurring subscriptions, so if I see that budget met and don't see any crazy $50/month charges, it just slips through. I overall just see a ballpark expected budget and my savings go up. Small fry slip through.
I can only imagine those unknowingly paying some small amount every month. It's a more realistic version of the whole "steal a penny from every citizen and become a millionaire!" scheme. But now times are harder and I'm calculating finances by the dollar.
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