Assuming you’ve never bought a box upgrade before CS 5.5, that would cost $1,899. Subscribing to CS Design Premium (assuming the purchaser’s never bought before) costs $1140 for a year with a year-long commitment and $1668 for a year on the month-to-month plan. Now, if you’re a larger studio, it’s to your advantage to continue buying your software every two years (assuming the pricing does actually stay the same as it is now). It’s another way to access and pay for the software, rather than a way to get access to incremental updates. The difference here is that the Adobe plan is a subscription, not a release of continuing upgrades. Browsers are also doing it-Chrome updates every six weeks, and Firefox 4 is moving in the same direction. As new things get added, they’re rolled out. HTML (formerly HTML5) is now considered a “living standard” without a release cycle. This is a change that’s happening in most software development communities-most visibly on the web. For Adobe, it creates a recurring revenue stream allowing them to stop relying on a large revenue dump every eighteen months, as currently happens. For younger designers or smaller studios, that’s really cool. This means you can subscribe to CS for about the same price every month as your iPhone bill. The subscription model is specifically for smaller practitioners who need to be able to incur smaller monthly charges, rather than making a larger outlay of cash at once.
Rather than looking at the technology (which I’ll get to later this week) I’d like to talk about the upcoming subscription model and how that’s going to affect your pricing as you move forward, because it’s causing some ire around the web.įor most of us, it won’t. But there are some not insignificant features to be discussed there. I’m sure that, by now, most of you have heard that Adobe has released Creative Suite 5.5, and that it’s a point upgrade-not CS6.