I don't even remember now when the last time was that I bought the whole Adobe Creative Suite, but I think it was 2011 or 2012-ish. I was, to that point, buying it every few years, because new features were rarely compelling enough in one release to justify upgrading over and over, even with upgrade pricing. I think it was north of a grand, but amortized over two or three years, I could roll with that. I think the software was certainly valuable enough.
But then in 2013 they switched to a subscription model, meaning they wanted to extract money from you monthly, and in return, you would always have the latest versions of everything. At $60 a month (maybe it was $50 then), I couldn't really justify it. I hung on to those last purchased versions for years, which was also super weird because the UI on most of the apps wasn't updated to use the newer, high resolution screens on Macs. The text was all chunky and gross.
Eventually the apps showed their age and lacked some of the cooler features. Adobe Premier Pro, for video editing, in particular had come a long way. I was using Photoshop and Lightroom a fair amount, Illustrator rarely, and Acrobat even more rarely. I eventually caved and bought the Photoshop and Lightroom subscription, because it started out at only $10 a month. Later, they offered a $30 rate for all of the apps, and I was on that for a long time. When you went to cancel, they offered the $30 to renew, and given that they could see how low my usage was, that sure makes sense. But this last time, a few months ago, there was no discount, and in no universe was I gonna pay $60 a month. Even the Photoshop/Lightroom sub was $20, and I skipped on that too.
These days, I'm not cutting a lot of video (though I should be, because of that doc I shot), but when I do, I'm using DaVinci Resolve, for which I have a perpetual license because I bought an edit controller. For photos, I'm mostly resizing images, which you can do natively in Windows and Mac. I'm a little ashamed, but I don't think I've taken a photo with my Canon since Europe, a year ago. Ugh, I'm starting to feel bad about it. Anyway, my point is that there's little value in the Adobe suite, even though it sure is nice to have when I do need it.
The funny thing is, I'm OK paying for web apps that run in a browser. I'd probably pay for the Google stuff if I wasn't grandfathered into a free plan. I pay for things like the New York Times with games, Vimeo (just on principle, because I like what they do), obviously streaming services. I get value out of that stuff. I got value from the Adobe stuff, but not relative to the cost. So now I just go without.
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