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Comment by pragmar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Agreed, but it did mean that most of the time you were working with an outdated version.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Working with an outdated version is frequently not a problem.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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