It's an annual price, billed monthly. Quite a lot of things are like this -- for example, the TV licence in the UK is a product that you buy for a year but pay

It's an annual price, billed monthly. Quite a lot of things are like this -- for example, the TV licence in the UK is a product that you buy for a year but pay monthly. Our council tax is, too. I don't believe the subscription has near marginal cost -- Adobe have a huge number of employees making hugely complex products, and this is how they choose to amortise it, instead of relying on people upgrading every three versions. It's not fraud; that's just not the right word to use. Is subscription pricing consumer-hostile? I don't know. But I do know that per-seat licensing of the prior Creative Suite was a non-trivial expense for a lot of design firms. My main objection to Creative Cloud is that it's a one-or-everything pricing model; that's the only thing I think risks being anti-competitive given their market share.