Is Adobe Creative Cloud too high in the sky?
Adobe Creative Cloud – Very creative if you can afford it
Web designers and web developers in Toronto are well aware of the importance of the Adobe Suite in the design and build process of a website.
The Adobe Creative Suite which contains key & powerful software such as Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Photoshop over the years has become part of the ‘must have’ set of tools for any web professional.
Since Adobe’s announcement of the move to the ‘Creative Cloud’ back in May (http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/introducing-the-creative-cloud/), the web community has reacted in anger frantically looking for viable and affordable alternatives.
The primary reason for the web community’s uproar is the restructure of Adobe’s licence subscriptions to regular monthly payments. Not a big issue for larger companies, working in large teams, who always update their software with every new version released – in fact, it probably works out cheaper for them now than it did with the old payment model.
But for the smaller team, students (even with the student/teacher discount) and freelancers this payment model effectively renders the whole Adobe Suite as an unaffordable luxury.
Below is a comparison table of the Adobe Creative Suite with the new and old Payment Models
| Creative Cloud (New Payment Model) | Creative Suite (Old Payment Model) | |
| Creative Suite CS6 | £46.88pm*24 = £1125.12 | £630 |
| Adobe Fireworks | N/A | £285 |
| Adobe Dreamweaver | £17.58pm*24 = £421.92 | £330 |
| Adobe Photoshop | £17.58pm*24 = £421.92 | £631 |
Not only does Adobe’s new payment model force the customer to commit to a continued subscription in order to still have access the tools, the price paid over 2 years for each product has increased by 25-50%.
Quite ironic really, but Adobe seem to think that the pricing structure is still accessible to everyone in the community. To quote Jeffrey Veen, Vice President of Products, Adobe ‘we’ve made all of this available at an accessible monthly price.’.
So what viable alternatives are there if you can no longer justify the subscription to Adobe? Over the next set of blog posts I will investigate the options that are currently available.
Discover more interesting web development Blog articles here on the Globalgraphics Web Design website.
