Thus Creative Cloud, which for a few dollars more if you already owned a version of Creative Suite, let you have access to virtually everything Adobe makes for $29.99 a month, or about $360 a year. But that’s fairly steep for a single piece of software that only went through six version transitions in 10 years. Assuming you signed up for the annual package, you’d pay about $240 a year. By comparison, an Audition subscription, pre-Creative Cloud, ran $19.95 a month if you signed up for a year, or $29.95 a month if you went month-to-month.

That subscription model had been around since 2011, but it was optional: Until this spring, Adobe still offered a boxed product you could pay for up front and use as long as you liked.Īdobe’s design tools have never been downmarket price-wise, but users accustomed to working with just one of those tools - Photoshop, say, but not, Illustrator or Audition but not Premiere Pro - were able to work around paying the full suite pricing by purchasing a la carte, even if they paid more on a per-product basis (it’s always been cheaper to pay the suite price if you use everything it offers and keep up with upgrades). My brother, who occasionally does audio engineering work and who was using Audition before Adobe snatched it from Syntrillium (where it was known as Cool Edit Pro) a decade ago, was mortified to learn that in order to have access to the latest version of just that one program, he’d have to pay for all the others in perpetuity.Īudition CS6 standalone, the last boxed version, cost $349 full price (the upgrade pricing ranged from $75 to $149, version depending, and there was no educational pricing - Adobe yanked it from most of its products last year). Follow May, Adobe upended its business model and upset broad swathes of its install base by shifting, full steam ahead, to a subscription-only model for its creative suite of tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

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