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Dear Adobe, we need a special price in Egypt
- karol 4y agoThat's cute but there are free alternatives. Or you can start making income in USD so that it makes sense to purchase software in the same currency.
- kyriakos 4y agoMicrosoft, Netflix, Google and many more offer different prices for the same products in different countries. Why can't Adobe do that?
- benatkin 4y agoThey don't do it _at all_?
- sabellito 4y agohttps://vpnwiki.com/en/youtube-premium-subscription-prices-by-country https://vpnwiki.com/en/youtube-premium-subscription-prices-b... https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netflix-cost/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netfl...
- benatkin 4y agoI'm asking about Adobe. Genuinely curious.
- apetresc 4y agoThey absolutely do. To pick one out of countless examples, YouTube Premium is about $1.56/month in India and $22.99/month in Canada.
- umvi 4y agoIt's kind of surreal to live in a world where the value of (digital) goods can scale to a region's current economic status in order to maximize global profits (i.e. video game costs $60 in USA but the same game is $1 in a poor African country). It makes sense from a business perspective but it also feels kind of cheesy because intuitively you feel like you are getting ripped off when your neighbor can buy the same good for a fraction of the cost because their country is doing poorly economically. And then it brings up some complex ethical questions like "is it stealing to use a VPN to buy a digital good at a fraction of the cost of your current geographic region"
- User23 4y agoYou can view it as getting ripped off, or you can view it as being charitable towards those with less purchasing power. I prefer the latter, both for high-minded reasons and because it just makes me feel better than feeling ripped off.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoDon’t think of it as money directly. Rather think of it as time. When you do, the quantities required are probably a lot closer.
- umvi 4y agoThat's what I'm saying. People are used to paying for a good based on its intrinsic value (cost to manufacture/distribute/etc. + some profit margin). But since digital goods are nearly 100% profit margin once created, you can instead pay with "time" aka % of your income. That's why it's surreal (for me at least) - it would be like walking into a grocery store, but instead of fixed prices the items on shelves had labels like "Box of Lucky Charms: .005% of your annual income"
- fifilura 4y agoI dont feel very sorry for you. The biggest rip-off is you having a salary that is 10-50 times higher than someone i Africa.
- danuker 4y agoIndeed, companies should tailor their licenses to the purchasing power of their customers, at LEAST at country-level. Still, I feel like a subscription is a service-as-a-software-substitute [1]. At least when I don't need continuous development. There are plenty of free and open-source programs. I have gotten by with Gimp for a lot of my needs. There is also Krita and darktable, and even the browser-based miniPaint [2]. [1] - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... [2] - https://viliusle.github.io/miniPaint/ https://viliusle.github.io/miniPaint/
- radlad 4y ago> There is also Krita and Lightroom, and even the browser-based miniPaint [2]. Lightroom as in Adobe Lightroom? miniPaint is very impressive, thanks for sharing.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago> Indeed, companies should tailor their licenses to the purchasing power of their customers, at LEAST at country-level. The problem then becomes that users in ‘rich’ countries use a VPN to get the ‘poor’ country pricing.
- danuker 4y ago
- benatkin 4y agoNo, what we need is less Adobe. Kthxbai.
- wlesieutre 4y agoIt's a good time to mention that Affinity's launch sale for v2 of their suite is running until next Wednesday. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, on Mac/Windows/iPad. One time payment of $100 for all of them, increasing to $170 after the sale. I know some people are too deep in the Adobe ecosystem for this to be a replacement but for me it's the best deal I've gotten on any software in years. Adobe has priced themselves out of the hobbyist market. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/affinity-pricing/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/affinity-pricing/
- benatkin 4y agoThanks an Affinity. I don't remember hearing about them, but I see HN has discussed it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530356 Perhaps you could do a Tell HN post? I'm also wondering what's happening with Adobe acquiring Figma. There's https://penpot.app/ https://penpot.app/ I took a look and saw that this is still there :) https://www.figma.com/figma-vs-adobe-xd/ https://www.figma.com/figma-vs-adobe-xd/
- stoicjumbotron 4y agoGoogle is the best example w.r.t to PPP imo
- nhchris 4y agoCan't wait until individual-level price discrimination, so that when you get a raise at work, 80% of it will be eaten by everything suddenly getting more expensive. So far it's just digital goods, but there's no reason grocery stores won't try the same.
- brink 4y agoThey do. Haven't you ever price compared a poor neighborhood's grocery store to a rich neighborhood? Meijer does this in the Midwest. The price difference is as much as 50%.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoHigher prices in a different grocery store could be due to many things, such as higher labor costs, property taxes, etc. But you can see price discrimination / segmentation even in the same grocery store. The old school way was via coupons. People who had time and inclination to clip coupons spent less (excluding their time and effort) for the same item from the same store. The more modern way, via apps, can drill down into an individual's willingness to pay price X for an item versus another individual's willingness to pay price Y for the same item.
- danuker 4y agoThis could be implemented as high default prices + steep discounts for people with tracking apps/cards. It's already happening. Luckily they can't raise the default prices too much, cause people without apps/cards will go someplace else. But with data like face recognition, it will become more prevalent, absent personal data regulation like the EU GDPR.
- mbfg 4y agoi certainly feel for the problems people have in this regard, but it can't possibly be limited to one software package. Clearly any US based product is going to incur the same expense, and as such, Adobe products add no greater egypt tax than any other US product. Now perhaps the number of US products needed for purchase in egypt is small, and this is a big example, but Adobe isn't doing this to people, at least not in a targeted way.
- LunarAurora 4y agoI have graphics artists friends in Arab countries. Apart for the (oil rich) Golf, Almost All (90-99%) of them (and their colleagues) just pirate adobe software. Those who care to justify will simply point to difference in the cost of living [1] even without large depreciations. I was reading a book on Mediterranean history the other day and was surprised by how (real) piracy what a “normal” state of affair for literally thousands of years. I’m not justifying anything. I’m just stating that poor countries have always pirated rich ones. It is like a balancing act. [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Egypt&city1=Alexandria&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY&displayCurrency=USD https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
- badpun 4y agoI wouldn't compare making a copy of a software someone wrote to capturing their ship, taking all their possessions and selling them to slavery or killing them. That's software industry propaganda.
- DonHopkins 4y agoWell "whatabout" all that entertainment industry propoganda and classist stereotypes against real pirates? How they're always relentlessly making fun of the way they talk, walk, their amputations, monocular vision, and pet preferences, shamelessly appropriating and disparagingly caricaturizing their culture for Halloween costumes and team mascots, and even cruelly comparing them to software and music thieves? ;)
- aidy 4y agoI think when something is priced beyond what people can afford, and they don't have alternatives, they are more likely to acquire it some other way. Adobe is an interesting example - it's a premium product, and there are alternatives, but the talent in the design space seems to be almost exclusively using Adobe. Designers work in a global community, which makes it difficult to build skills to be competitive without equivalent access. If something costs 10+ times more on a regional salary than it would in say the US, then I'm not surprised that piracy is rife. Subscription pricing has compounded this. Back when you bought up front and selectively paid for lower cost upgrade maintenance, people would stomach the pain, as you ended up with a product you had security of ownership on. Today, in South Africa as an example, the cost of an annual CC subscription could be as much as 10% of a junior designer's annual package, if not more. It's sad, as regions like Africa have young, creative populations who could really contribute to creative communities given half the chance.
- realitybytes18 4y agoi don't understand... what are the consequences of economic failure if everything is adjusted proportionally?
- Nifty3929 4y agoWhy should Adobe do this? Are they giving up a large market for their products in Egypt? If they reduced the price, would they make it up in volume? It doesn't sound like it. Would they be able to prevent others in wealthier countries from taking advantage of a lower price in Egypt? Why are Egyptian Pounds dropping relative to Dollars? How about fixing this at the ballot box? Or is that a dubious proposition as well?
- aidy 4y agoUpvoted from South Africa! At our exchange rate we are hugely disadvantaged on all USD / EU / GBP priced products, which in turn affects our ability to participate in global markets on the same footing. Whilst there are alternate products, everyone we work with uses the Adobe suite for good reason, it is a superb solution, and we haemorrhage our bank accounts to be able to use these tools which we love so dearly.