I’ve been a paid subscriber of Adobe Creative Cloud for years now, but financial circumstances call for some belt tightening in the world of online subscriptions, even supposedly “essential” ones like this. After taxes, the price for a year subscription to all Adobe apps in Canada has risen, after tax to something upwards of of $993 CDN/yr.

I use Photoshop often, and I use Lightroom to organize AI image galleries into folders (I don’t use any of the editing features built into Lightroom). When I’m working on print books, booklets, and small home-made newspapers, I use InDesign, but tbh I hate that app. Very occasionally for weirdo one-off projects, I’ll crack open Illustrator or something else, but it’s not usually with glee.

When Adobe released Firefly, I found it to be pretty meh. I appreciate being able to use generative fill to retouch images generated with other AIs, but I don’t enjoy another company interpolating a layer of scolding when something I need to do to tell a story or make a particular piece of art doesn’t meet their “content policy.” I’m done with all that.

Recently, The Verge quoted Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe, as saying that artists and creative people will be “left behind” if they don’t embrace generative AI – no doubt meaning Adobe’s version of it.

(Image via Ideogram)

I think that’s sort of a silly and unnecessarily dramatic all or nothing attitude to take, especially for a company like Adobe. The future of AI and the arts is shades of grey and making it all work for you in a way that feels good to your sensibility – and that includes not using it. Taking this other more drastic position makes Adobe leadership read as, unfortunately, authoritarian and more than a bit out of touch with the mood of the moment around AI among (some) people in the arts.

More than any gaffes Adobe has made around its handling of AI though, I’m feeling more offended by the price tag. I went through the ropes to figure out how I could cancel it. After trying to do exactly that, the system offered me a discounted rate for a year, something around $672~ iirc (guesstimate), and also suggested I might get a “custom deal” if I chat with an agent. I did, and they offered me the new magical rate of CAD 467.88/year because I’ve been a customer with Adobe. I told them to put that on hold while I reassess the situation.

My assessment of it is this: it’s predatory to offer different pricing to people who try to cancel, and it makes me not trust the company to be honest and transparent about their pricing if they have this sliding range. What’s the true cost per user on their end? Exactly how much profit do they make off each person who subscribes?

I did find that there is a much lower priced series of Photography plans offered by Adobe where you get Photoshop and/or Lightroom and some amount of cloud storage. I hate and don’t use cloud storage, personally, but the rate of CAD $12.99/mo for the 20GB plan doesn’t sound so bad.

But the whole thing has accelerated my desire to escape the Adobe mad-house. Which is really too bad for them, I think, given that I am an artist making heavy use of generative AI in my work. I should be squarely in their target market, but they don’t seem to be innovating out on the edges of where I can sense this technology ought to go. They seem too entrenched as a deeply established player with vested interests to really get out there and experiment and break new ground nobody has done so far in the industry. And really really serve the needs of this new emerging class of artists like myself.

I just don’t see that currently out of their product offering though, and given those public statements in The Verge, I’m wondering if their leadership has the vision to get there from here. And since I don’t really see listed that they are hiring, you know, actual artists to help them figure these things out, I just don’t see how they’ll stay at the forefront for long. Especially now that there are competitors out there with ever-increasing product offerings that are looking if not perfect, then at least adequate, and something you can “own” (via license) instead of a cradle-to-grave subscription.

Maybe it’s time to leave Adobe behind?

So, my current thinking is:

  • Draw down to just the Photography 20GB plan for 1 year as a test.
  • Buy Affinity Publisher as a replacement for InDesign (I don’t collab with anybody using InDesign, so there’s not really any love lost there).
  • Buy Pixelmator Pro to try it out as a full-on Photoshop replacement, and test if Photomator can replace my simple use of Lightroom.
  • Upgrade from the ebook only version of Vellum, which I love, to the version that includes print output for rapid projects.

Even if I bought a bunch of other programs and don’t like them, I’ll still have paid less than I would have for the “deeply discounted” suspicious sliding pricing Adobe seems to be employing to keep people paying at all costs.

I wish this weren’t the case. I wish Adobe were still great, and that it brought the excitement to use its products like it did when I was first learning them decades ago. But times change, and we have to change with them.

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