Adobe’s Creative Cloud Apps Released – Onward to Subscriptions!

Welp, it’s here: Adobe’s Creative Cloud (R.I.P., Creative Suite). As mentioned last month, this marks the first time that Adobe will no longer offer its product suites as stand-alone copies. Instead, to gain access to Adobe’s latest and greatest, you’ll need to add a new subscription to your list – and unless you use Adobe’s products to make a living, chances are it’s going to be priced outside of what you’re looking to pay.

Regular pricing for Adobe’s CC is $50/mo ($600/yr) for an annual commitment, or $75/mo for a “cancel anytime” plan. Single apps can be had for $20 per ($240/yr), while team licenses can be had for $70/mo and adds a couple of nice benefits. Until the end of July, owners of CS3 – CS5.5 can take advantage of promo pricing, $30/mo for the first year, while those with CS6 get even better pricing of $20/mo for the first year.

As mentioned before, to the casual user this is going to seem a little expensive, but to those who use Adobe’s products to earn their living, the CC model could be preferable to a lot of people. If you’ve previously been in the habit of upgrading from each version to the next, or at least within three years, CC could be cheaper for you in the long run. An added benefit is that you gain access to all of Adobe’s products – products you likely didn’t have access to before.

Adobe Photoshop CC

Still, it’s clear that not everyone is going to love this scheme. Corel has quickly taken advantage of the situation to help coax disgruntled users to convert over to its suite of products – it even goes as far as to recommend apps based on the Adobe product you use. This might seem pretty appealing to those who feel alienated by Adobe’s decision to cease Fireworks development (though that will still be sold as stand-alone for those who want to upgrade to CS6).

So, what about home users? $600 a year is a bit much to ask of them, but it’s not home users Adobe is targeting with CC. Instead, the company offers a range of other products to cater to them, such as Photoshop and Premiere Elements, which will still be sold as stand-alone, as will Lightroom (good guy Adobe for this decision).

There are so many new features to hit all of the CC apps that it’d take a couple of pages to discuss them all. Instead, I’d recommend heading over to a particular product page to see what’s new.

Because it’s a little hard to distinguish what “cloud” means sometimes, I’d like to make it clear that Creative Cloud apps will run with no Internet – “cloud” refers to the syncing features and the ability to always keep up-to-date.

I’ll be testing out CC to see what the experience is like, and will report later with my thoughts.