Do you want allegedly useful “artificial intelligence” features in your face in every single service and tool you use, constantly, unceasingly, and demanding you pay more for it? No? Too freakin’ bad, it’s coming anyway. The latest perpetrator is Adobe, who’s now raising the price of its priciest Creative Cloud plans next month and justifying it by bundling in a bunch of generative AI tools.
The Creative Cloud All Apps plan is being renamed Creative Cloud Pro, because apparently tools that cost hundreds of dollars a year and aren’t available as full purchases aren’t for “professionals” unless they’re paying the maximum amount. If you’re in the US, Canada, or Mexico, and if you’re currently subscribed to All Apps, you’ll be moved over to the Pro plan starting on June 17th… with a price bump from $60 per month to $70 per month for standard, yearly-subscribed users in the US.
Month-to-month prices will jump from the already-sky-high $90 per month to $105 per month. You can save a small amount on this by paying for a full year of access up front—that’s a whopping $780, which is a $120 increase over the previous yearly price for access to all Adobe apps. As usual, students and teachers qualify for discounts, using Aristotle’s “get ’em hooked while young” approach.
Users will have the option to continue with their existing level of access, renamed from Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Standard, for $55 per month on a yearly contract (or $82.49 month-to-month, $600 per year prepaid). Those rates are actually slightly cheaper than the existing prices for the same level of access… but the new plan won’t be available to new users starting in June.
I repeat: in order to get the Standard plan, you’ll need to be an existing subscriber. New users won’t have access to those lower prices, and you’ll need to manually change over to get the cheaper Standard plan. How can it be a “Standard” plan if Adobe doesn’t make it available to everyone? I don’t know. Third base.
Adobe
For the higher Pro prices, Adobe is offering “full access” to the premium online versions of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Fresco—even at $55 a month, you’ll be stuck with the free web versions of everything except Acrobat. Pro also offers 4,000 credits a month for “up to 40 5-second [AI-generated] videos” or 14 minutes of translated video and audio, plus unlimited generative image and vector tools. Standard users get only 25 credits a month for Generative Fill, etc.
As The Verge notes, initial reactions from Adobe customers are scathing. Microsoft, Google, and Canva all got similar rebukes as they’ve tried to force expensive and allegedly useful AI upgrades on their users. More than one poster on the After Effects subreddit has implied that they’ll continue using Adobe’s programs without paying for them. Ahem-hem.
Adobe offers several plans below the All Apps/Pro level that don’t include access to dozens of programs, and they don’t appear to be changing at the moment. There’s also no indication that the new plans will be spreading beyond North America, at least for the time being. But speaking as someone who’s pass the two-decade mark as a Photoshop user, if you’re looking for less pricey, less exploitative options, you might want to look right here.
