Unpopular Opinion: Adobe's Subscription Model is Not That Bad

Adobe’s proposed terms and handling of the backlash? Awful.

Adobe’s signup process and (maliciously?) difficult cancellation process? Awful.

Unpopular opinion: I just don’t see the price and subscription model as all that problematic.

In the ‘90s, Adobe had plenty of competitors: Macromedia, Allaire, Aldus, QuarkXPress, Frame Technology Corporation, Corel, etc. Quark and Corel still stand, but Adobe eventually bought everything else. Dreamweaver, FrameMaker, PageMaker, and Freehand were all acquired, with some discontinued. Adobe even discontinued some of their own products after these acquisitions, preferring the acquired software. This happened to Adobe GoLive, Adobe LiveMotion, and Adobe ImageReady—not many, but it happened.

All that to say: these programs were more expensive in the ‘90s, even with tons of competition. Not to mention that one did not simply run these programs on commodity machines. It was assumed you purchased and planned on operating very robust hardware for professional desktop publishing or online video editing workflows. The cost of starting a business doing print graphics design (this was before the web or at least before web graphics were interesting) could easily exceed $10k USD. Each major application was $500+ USD, in 1990’s money. Licensing was a nightmare, often involving dongles. There was a reason this stuff was niche! The costs were prohibitive, and people would try and make older versions last longer and longer. This meant that people would get stranded on older operating systems to support older software. Older operating systems meant less secure, less robust, and more maintenance burdens for organizations everywhere.

Eventually, Adobe offered a creative person’s Microsoft Office, called Creative Suite. Now you could get access to almost everything Adobe made. The first one, Creative Suite 1, didn’t have video editing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. At the time, these were still considered too niche and required too powerful a machine to run.

Creative Suite 1’s Premium version was ~$1300 in the early 2000s. They commoditized their own tools. The last release of Creative Suite (6, around 2012, if memory serves) had a ‘Master Collection’ for ~$2600. It included video, audio, web, and print tools. It was heaps cheaper than buying each of the individual applications even once every two years.

Creative Suite was the last configuration of the various Adobe applications that you could buy once and only once. Adobe then moved to subscriptions, which have been the norm for more than a decade. Here, I think, is where a lot of the vitriol is. In enterprise software, subscriptions are the norm. Now, suddenly, these applications were priced to be commodity applications. Anybody could buy these tools and use them. Students could start college doing graphics design and remain on competitive, secure, modern software for $600-$800 a year and any modern laptop. I'm not saying I'd want to be editing video in Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects with a MacBook Air M1 and 8GB of RAM. But, I could. Indeed, I could run it on any Intel 6th generation CPU (~2015). So it's well supported on any number of older machines, but often with newer operating systems whose own support windows are less expansive than Adobe's. Why would you want to be running on unsupported software, anyway?

This gets us to the next bit: operating systems. Linux and macOS are free updates. Ditto Android and iOS. The only operating system to charge money these days is Microsoft Windows, and honestly, I can't figure out why. They add features and security updates regularly, but some versions or editions might have specific feature changes. macOS adds features while charging nothing for updates. So, for a lot of people, operating systems—like browsers—are free, evergreen things that are fluid. It's not so scary to upgrade when you know upgrades happen all the time. This reduces maintenance burdens on IT organizations.

And, more importantly, it is infinitely more secure. Users are entitled to the latest fixes and features as soon as they're made available. And, because the process of getting new software is so easy, it's also trivial to install preview features or beta features or whatever word you want to use. This has the effect of giving the development team more valuable feedback which informs their work. It is end to end a better deal. The Adobe product teams sometimes release new features—from request to delivery—in weeks! And indeed, their migration to Apple Silicon—while not a record-setting pace by any stretch—was buoyed by the fast feedback and validation of users in the community. I could download and try out Apple Silicon ports of my software almost a year before they were GA. And in many cases, they were already very usable and very fast.

Subscription services make it so that the cost of software is dramatically reduced over the long term (and—importantly—very consistent for cost estimations). Subscriptions make a lot of sense given the ease of distribution (the network), the rapid pace and friction-free nature of updating operating systems, the online, interconnected world we live in and the associated security risks, and the consistency of support.

Adobe's subscription model is both cheaper than the alternatives and a better overall product. I love DaVinci Resolve. I loved Serif PagePlus (the precursor to Affinity Publisher), and now love Affinity Publisher and Photo and Designer. I loved QuarkXPress at one point in the ‘90s. I was a Macromedia Freehand user, too. I used Dreamweaver, not GoLive. I get it. I miss some of the competition. That all said, I'm a happy Adobe user today. I use Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Audition, Adobe After Effects, and - sometimes - Adobe InDesign. The integration across best-of-breed products representing decades of evolution and sophistication is hard to beat. These tools are all paradigm-definining options. Photoshop is even a verb!

Adobe Creative Cloud is a cheap, secure, modern, up-to-date, and sophisticated offering and it's made better because it is available by subscription. If your use case is that you just want a photo editor and have no intention of using it much after whatever you're doing right now, then by all means, use a free online photo editor or use Affinity Publisher. But if you're a professional, with expectations that you'll continuously need access to a number of applications, then it has never been cheaper or more convenient to get access to robust, secure, integrated applications.