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Comment by Samuel_Michon | Hacker News Reader

“I'm not going to justify $50 per month for [hobby usage at home], [...] A $700 upgrade every three years comes to $20/month.”

“upgrading from CS4 to CS6 [...] A few hundred dollars every few years”

As you use Photoshop, Illustrator, and AfterEffects, that means you probably have the Production Premium or Master Collection bundle. Upgrades for those bundles did not come cheap.

Adobe releases a new major version of CS every year, and has done so since CS3. CS4 is 5 years old. If Adobe kept its perpetual upgrade plans, you would have to first upgrade to CS6 to be able to upgrade to this year’s version (‘CS7’) – having to buy two upgrades would’ve cost way more than $700. Instead, Adobe gives users of CS3 or newer a discount to Creative Cloud, all Adobe apps for $30 a month.

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Obviously he wasn't upgrading every release.

Adobe has always allowed for 1 skipped major version. For instance, if you had Photoshop 5, you could skip version 6 and you would still be eligible for upgrade pricing for version 7.

If GP were to upgrade now from CS4 to CS6, he would also have to upgrade to CS8 next year (if Adobe still offered perpetual upgrades). That would be more expensive than Creative Cloud, he would get less apps, and fewer updates.

Adobe used to allow upgrades fron any version to the latest for the same upgrade price. That changed somewhere around the time of CS1 to only allow upgrades from 2 versions back, then down to 1. As a longtime Illustrator (v88) and Photoshop (v2.5) user, this is the end of my Adobe purchases.

You’re right, I remembered it incorrectly.

I started using Photoshop at version 2.5 and Illustrator at version 5, but I had forgotten that the upgrade policy used to be more liberal and that Adobe’s installers weren’t atrocious. It’s all coming back to me now. On the flipside: stupid ATM and screen fonts, buggy QuarkXpress, monitors with thousands of colors, and having to do preflight – ugh.

Some things really have improved. The Creative Cloud application installer is a delight. Updates are released often and the updating process is painless. No more hassle dealing with DVDs and serial numbers. Also, international pricing used to be way out of whack with US prices, the difference is a lot smaller now.

The upgrade path used to be pretty liberal, until last year you could skip two releases and still catch an upgrade. I think I've spent about $1800 total over 11 years: Macromedia MX Studio (2002) > CS3 Web Premium (2007) > CS6 (2012). That's a just over $13 a month. Not cheap when time comes to upgrade or lose eligibility, yes, but much cheaper than $50 per month in the long run. It really depends on the user's upgrade cycle.

Agreed, but it did mean that most of the time you were working with an outdated version. Also, you had less than half of the apps that are available in the Creative Cloud.

For folks like me, who bought the Master Collection once, and then upgraded every year, the Creative Cloud is way, way cheaper.

Your case, buying the most expensive product Adobe offers and then upgrading with the greatest frequency possible, is about the only thing Creative Cloud is cheaper than.

At $600/year, it's roughly competitive with upgrading to a new version of one of the Premium collections every 18 months. It's more expensive than upgrading to the latest Design Standard has been on that timeframe.

Right, the annual price you pay for Creative Cloud is comparable to buying Adobe’s upgrades in the past (a major release every 18 months). New users never have to ‘buy in’, so they save $1300 (Design Standard) to $2600 (Master Collection). Customers who bought the boxed versions don’t save as much. They get a discount of $240 to $360 in the first year.

Working with an outdated version is frequently not a problem.

I'm a professional animated filmmaker, and I've spent most of my career using versions of Adobe products that were two or three versions behind the cutting edge. Aside from the DeBlur tool, for example, I don't even know what's in CS6.

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