Membership going from $29 to $49 per month

Question

I received an email saying that starting next month my membership will be $49 per month instead of the $29 I have been paying.  I have the annual plan where I pay monthly.  Why is it going up?

Answer 1

symbolized_bar_code wrote:
There are plenty of good arguments opposing CC, fear of  a massive price hike isn't one of them.
For current CS6 customers CC is already a price increase of 150% to 500%. Why do you think it will be different next year? Even edu versions face a drastic price increase.
Where does the price increase come from:
1) A perpetual license has a value. You can sell it or use it indefinitely. To compare subscription and perpetual prices you must takes this into account. You probably will lose about $200 to $300 dollars if you sell your actual version. So only this needs to be added to the costs. If the price for a full version goes up or down after some years this is an adjustment for the calculation, too. An individual subscription user pays at the moment $600 per year. Based on the last update cost to CS5.5 and CS6 the subscription price is about 25% more expensive than perpetual upgrades of CS6 Master Suite.
2) Existing user invested already in perpetual licenses. A CS6 license will in 3-5 years not be up-to-date anymore and will have lost its value. (Before CC users could keep up the value of their software by buying upgrades.) This value loss has to be added to the subscription costs. Over a span of 5 years this doubles the cost of CC for existing user, which is another 100% price increase.
3) The larger number of professional users works in specialized fields. They edit video, create websites or work in design. This is why Adobe offered specialized suites (Web, Production, Standard). The base price and upgrade prices were about half of the master suite. CC doesn’t offer any special packages for those user groups. For them CC is already 150% more expensive. If they are existing users they are losing even more.
4) If you want to purchase more than one CC in your name or if you want to purchase even one CC in the name of your company you are forced by Adobe to pay for the team version. This is another 40% of price increase on top of the above price increases. This price increase comes with no value at all, if you don’t want to can’t use cloud space (e.g. because of legal restrictions)
5) Additionally with the subscription you need to pay indefinitely. If you need to work on old files you are forced to pay forever. Before users were able to skip an upgrade, if an update didn’t have enough value for them. So CC forces to pay for something that you might not need or want. You need to take all those costs into account if you compare CC and perpetual licenses. If you work in an environment that relies on specific working processes you can’t just install a new feature upgrade that might break your workflow or creates unbearable costs in the IT department, because it needs to be managed.
6) Student versions are about 50-100% more expensive now.
7) If you want to end CC and switch to other software you are forced to manually convert all your files into other formats. Many conversations won’t work fully. You will lose data or have to do correct the results afterwards spending a lot of time. One user wrote about this experience. He just switched from the actual upgraded CS6 Cloud versions back to CS6. After this experience he cancelled his cloud subscription, because he realized CC is suicide. Since CC doesn’t give you any exit strategy you need to calculate all this time and (lost) money into your comparison.
So in general CC means dramatic price increases for the vast number of users. Only if you fulfill all the following criteria CC’s price is acceptable:
You are a new user
You are an individual user
You need to use the whole suite
You are able to use the cloud storage (legal, bandwidth)
You would upgrade immediately to each new version
You plan to use CC indefinitely or don’t  mind to pay for the next 20+ years
A subscription model can be an advantage in some cases. The problem is that it is subscription only. As a company owner with various employees a subscription might make sense. You can also write it off immediately. In case you shrink your company later or close it you could purchase one perpetual version that you could use to open and edit older files. That is the missing exit strategy.