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Comment by h1d | Hacker News Reader

Their pricing is way too high as developer tools just because they have near monopoly.

Top of the line programming tools like Jetbrains give you their entire list of about 10 apps for $12 or so a month from 3rd year (Starting from about $20 a month for the 1st year) and of course individual apps are even cheaper.

Heck, even MS gives you the entire office suit for $10 a month with 1TB of cloud storage which I think is a good deal.

We need more competitors to drag Adobe's monopoly down. Their apps are built on ancient code, the performance is so bad compared to apps like Affinity Photo and they put folders and icons all over the Application folder on Mac I can't believe its annoyance.

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I do find it somewhat rich that on a forum where the overwhelming advice for entrepreneurs is "Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.", people complain about pricing. I guess it's different when you're on the other end :)

I don't know, man. I guess they will charge what the market lets them get away with. It's a for-profit business, and if they do one thing right, it's marketing & sales. You might be pissed off about the pricing, but the market stands behind it - there was a lot of skepticism even internally on the subscription model, but I think the executives were proven right on this one. You may hate them for it, and anecdotally it's easy to find Adobe haters... but not all the market does. AFAICT, far from it, there are still way more promoters than detractors. And the subscription pricing opened up a large market that nobody even thought existed - not to mention the fact that it made revenue streams more predictable. At this point, I think it's really hard to argue that the pricing is hurting the company in any way - if you look at the numbers that is, not at anecdotes about how one particular person/ set of persons feels about it.

Paying $720 a year for a tool that is my livelihood is nothing.

That’s about a day or two worth of billable work for the cheapest employee.

And not everyone is 100% focused to be a designer and again not everyone works at the highest average salary region.

And even without those points, Adobe's pricing is just off from other professional tools.

Assuming an 8 hour day and two days worth of billable work, that assumes you are making or your company is billing you out at $45/hour. Not exactly highest average salary.

But if you aren’t a professional designer, you no more need Adobe’s high end offering than a non professionally developer needs to spend thousands on an MSDN license.

I pay about $45 a month between JetBrsins R# and Linux Academy ($300 a year).

That doesn’t count the money I spend money on Udemy and soon hosting costs for side projects.

$60 a month to do your job is not that much. I’m not even making money from the money I’m spending, that’s just to keep up with technology.

>Adobe's pricing is just off from other professional tools.

Adobe's pricing is just in line with most professional software. AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Vectorworks all cost a similar amount of 1000s of dollars.

not even close. Maya and 3dsmax start at $1500 a year. I'm pretty sure most other professional 3d software is in a similar ballpark or more. The apps are complex and the market for them is arguably not large enough to support the development costs at a lower price point. AutoCAD is another example. Even Unity is $1500 a year. Pro Audio tools are in a similar category.

That's fine, but I'm a developer, $720 is a lot of money just to open a file sent to me from a designer when they could have just sent a .png

I think all Adobe tools can save .png, except for Audition maybe. Just talk to the designer and ask for .png?

XD has a free plan (which just limits the number of simultaneous prototypes you can share).

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