I don’t think anything I write here will make any difference, I’m mostly writing it for myself so I can hopefully air my frustration and move on.

I’ve been a paying customer for as long as I’ve been a photographer and creative. I started with Lightroom some 5 years ago, progressed to Photoshop, then the CS Production Premium suite. The simple reality is that as someone who wants people to respect my rights on my works, I want to respect the rights of those who make the tools I use. So I do, and I hand over my hard earned money when I can to keep my tools as current as I can.

I make this point because while I will pay for something or do without, I’m not always in a position where I can pay on someone else’s schedule as opposed to mine. The Creative Suite perpetual license model let me do this, if I didn’t have the money now, I could hold off and keep using my tools until I did have the money to upgrade. If that meant skipping a version, that meant I keep using out of date tools without the latest and greatest features but I could at least keep working.

On the other hand, the subscription model for Creative Cloud removes all of that flexibility. Ultimately, this detracts from the value so much as to make the Creative Cloud unattractive to me in it’s entity as the product currently stands. For me the risks to me are twofold.

First, there’s the risk associated with future pricing. The introductory pricing of $240 for the first year, is very attractive, however after the first year it increases to $600. After that, who knows. Adobe isn’t making any guarantees that the price won’t be significantly hiked in subsequent years. Why would they that would be a poor business decision. What we do know, at least from recent history, is that the value of the dollar will likely continue to decline with inflation and the price of goods and services will go up. The simple reality is the costs to me aren’t fixed, or easily calculable. I can’t count on CC being $600 a year in 2 or 3 years.

Compounding the matter is the risk associated with my continued use being tied directly to my continued payment. The simple matter is a bad quarter, a serious injury, or any number of other issues can easily stifle my cash flow in such a way that I become unable to continue the subscription at any given point in time. The direct result of course is total ruination, as the tools you need suddenly are no longer functional. I’m not a big business, while $600 a year isn’t in an unfathomable amount of money, at the same time it’s nothing for me to sneeze at either.

In a nutshell, that loss of control over my ability to create unless I’m still paying is why I won’t be moving to Creative Cloud anytime soon. It’s immensely frustrating for me too, as I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable premium for a perpetual license of the CC software, there’s certainly features there worth paying for. I’d even be more willing to consider a subscription service if there was a way to leave the service without also losing my tools. In fact, the subscription services I’ve used in the past have used this model. When you unsubscribe, your software still works and you still can use it, but you receive no support and no updates.

In the end, the whimper, is that I can only hope that there’s enough backlash against the subscription only model that Adobe brings back a perpetual license. I’m certainly not big enough or influential enough to effect any change. That and the inevitable fact that eventually CS6 wont be sufficient to remain competitive or functional on some future OS and I’ll have to upgrade into perpetually paying.