Did Adobe just increase the price for their Lightroom Classic and Photoshop package from $9.99 to $19.99? Are they testing it? Just what is going on?
Well, the answer to that is that no one seems to know. At least at this point.
DPReview says that Adobe is testing to replace the $10/month Photography plan with a 1TB $20/month option. While PetaPixal flatly claims that the $10 plan is no longer available. In the world of Fstoppers, the whole thing apparently didn’t happen as there was nothing mentioned about it. On the other hand I reached out to Adobe’s customer support via chat and they told me that there is no test, is no increase, and that there are some “technical issues from our side.”
One has to wonder how a technical issue could result in a page offering something that was never before available while at the same time removing some that has always been available could occur, but hey, I suppose it could happen.
Personally I tend to agree with Adobe’s official statement; it was a test. I also feel that there was sufficient blowback that they thought the better of it. CSR reps don’t just spew out a line relating to something as huge as this without it being passed down.
Generally, that is.
Here’s the deal. Adobe is a huge corporation who at the end of the day owes their allegiance to their shareholders. Love it or hate it, that is the reality. Their existence is solely predicated on the basis of making money for shareholders. Period. End. Of. Story. I don’t have a problem with that. That’s how capitalism works. If not for that concept, there would be no Lightroom and Photoshop. We’d all be stuck with Giimp or some other nonsensical freeware. But all of that being said, Adobe needs to walk a fine line. They have undoubtedly increased profits since the advent of the subscription model; a model that I personally love. But if they bump it to $20 a month they will lose a lot of people. Their pitch seems to be that with the $20 you’ll get 1TB of cloud storage instead of the 20GB that currently comes with the $10 plan.
So what. Personally, I couldn’t care less about a single KB of cloud storage that Adobe might offer. The way I look at it, Adobe is a company that makes its bread and butter mostly as a developer of applications for creatives, not selling storage space in the cloud. As a photographer, the only thing from Adobe that I care about is Lightroom and Photoshop. If they start charging $20 per month for me to use Lightroom and Photoshop I’ll probably need to reassess my relationship with Adobe. No, I might not bail right away, but I’ll definitely start laying the groundwork for as easy and painless of an exit as possible.
Trust me, Adobe. You don’t want that. No, Adobe doesn’t care about what I will do, but I think that I represent a huge segment of their user base; enthusiast/professional users. After all, for photographers, Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard and contrary what many like to pretend, these are absolutely the best overall tools available for many reasons. Yes, there are other options out their, but they pale in comparison. The workflow possible with Lightroom and Photoshop is difficult to replicate in any other ecosystem.
But that’s changing. As I write this there have been a number of other vendors who are starting to become competitive. I am confident that within 5 years there will be fully competitive alternatives available.
What else am I confident of? Within 5 years you’ll be hard pressed to find any meaningful alternative that isn’t a subscription model.
So, there’s that.