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The value proposition for Adobe's software-as-a-service offering is lacking for people who only use one of their products, or who don't already stay on the blee

The value proposition for Adobe's software-as-a-service offering is lacking for people who only use one of their products, or who don't already stay on the bleeding edge by paying for upgrades every 2-3 years. Photoshop is the only Adobe product I use as a web developer, and I've been using it less and less as I do more backend and client architecture and less design implementation. For my needs, Creative Cloud is a really bad deal. Creative Cloud might be a great value to people who use lots of Adobe products, and good for them. But even if this were a good value to me, I still wouldn't buy it. I do not trust software as a service, at least for software that runs solely on my own workstation. Unless Adobe wants to subsidize the cost of my own hardware, I don't believe that their subscription model benefits me as a consumer. I think Creative Cloud will present an interesting challenge to the Open Source community. Open Source alternatives to Photoshop have kind of languished in recent years, and I wonder if Adobe abandoning traditional software licensing will spur new free software development.

kbenson 13y ago
Then pay $20/mo (with year subscription) for just Photoshop. If you need another tool occasionally, pay the monthly fee for it for a single month. $20 a month it's all that much money for a business product. You may be paying close to that for reliable hosting with all the perks or for some virtual servers for testing.
- beedogs 13y ago
  $240 a year for something I use every few weeks, at best, is still pretty absurd.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    Don't commit to the full year, then. You at no point are stuck buying $240 a year save for some deals, you can start and cancel CC to your heart's content.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    Only if it doesn't provide that much value. In the cases where you use it, if you can't do without it or use another tool, or you view the one time cost of learning another tool too high, then it's worth it. If this pricing makes you re-examine whether you really need to use Photoshop and switch to something cheaper, all the better, since you will probably be happier with something that accomplishes your needs that you feel isn't costing too much (and I imagine whatever you do in Photoshop so infrequently isn't hard to accomplish in many other programs).

kbenson 13y ago

Then pay $20/mo (with year subscription) for just Photoshop. If you need another tool occasionally, pay the monthly fee for it for a single month. $20 a month it's all that much money for a business product. You may be paying close to that for reliable hosting with all the perks or for some virtual servers for testing.

beedogs 13y ago
$240 a year for something I use every few weeks, at best, is still pretty absurd.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Don't commit to the full year, then. You at no point are stuck buying $240 a year save for some deals, you can start and cancel CC to your heart's content.
- kbenson 13y ago
  Only if it doesn't provide that much value. In the cases where you use it, if you can't do without it or use another tool, or you view the one time cost of learning another tool too high, then it's worth it. If this pricing makes you re-examine whether you really need to use Photoshop and switch to something cheaper, all the better, since you will probably be happier with something that accomplishes your needs that you feel isn't costing too much (and I imagine whatever you do in Photoshop so infrequently isn't hard to accomplish in many other programs).