Hi James,
This is a good illustration of your workflow and concerns. I appreciate your taking the time to describe it and provide the example.
To be honest: my take is that by preserving this workflow, you are still actually using Ps in a fairly sophisticated way. You have not really "exited" the Ps subscription program, but instead are continuing to receive significant value from being able to edit such documents. More specifically, you are retaining the ability to go into a (potentially very complex, multi-layered) document, edit individual components, and render out / export a new version for a client. That's what Adobe is saying they're going to charge you $10 a month to be able to perform ...
Hi Eric,
unfortunately, we don't qualify... and for what we need - take a look at the costs below.
this is an extract from a post on another topic. -
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=78151.msg627986#msg627986 We have about 20 design standard licenses, 3 production premium licences, maybe 15 acrobat pro and a few individual PS, and AI and maybe 10 or 15 PSe licences. (we have no master suite) – small customers to be sure in Adobe grand scheme of things.
we're currently using CS5. we wanted to move to 6 when it was released, but 5.5 being treated as a full release put us 2 releases behind which we certainly weren’t pleased about.. but we can get over that..
in general, we've upgraded every 2 releases. we certainly see the advantage of upgrades, but we have to balance costs.
so..
the last time we upgraded from CS 3 to CS5, I think it cost us about €18k - so annualized, €6k.. a very manageable amount of money.
the thing is, almost none of us use just 1 program, a lot of us use PS, AI and ID on a daily basis. design standard was the ideal package for the majority of us, and we expanded where needed.
I certainly understand the benefit of the full master suite - I'd love to have it.. but.. not everyone in our team need it.. you can buy the individual licences but, it's not really viable to do it for 3 individual licenses per user.
quickly doing the math - even just for
25 CC licences (which isn't enough for us but probably representative of what we currently use) - €61 per user per month, that's 61*12*25 - that comes to
€18k per year! now to make things worse, instead of getting a discount for buying 25 licenses, they introduce
"teams"... so instead of paying
€61 per month, it's €86!!! so that's 86*12*25 - that's almost
€26,000 per year!!!I like centrally managed licenses, I don't need 100gb of online storage.
so that goes from an annualized cost of
€6k per year to €26k per year..__________________________
so that's a pretty big jump - we're growing, getting more users, our bill may be €50k per year in the not too distant future through expansion and increases. having just gone through a recession, where we had to make the choice between layoffs and software maintenance, we chose to invest in our staff, if we didn't we wouldn't be as strong as we are today. we were able to hold off our maintenance to our PTC, Autodesk, Keyshot and Dassault systems software companies for a year or 2 and keep our staff and maintain the ability to work. we are now back on maintenance for most software, having paid a penalty for our hiatus, but that allowed us to survive..
my point is who knows what the future holds, but I know Adobes' success depends on it's clients success, and I know Adobe employees want us to succeed, but... some of the decision makers are not making it easy.
if it was $10 a month, I wouldn't even be talking about it.. but it's actually more like buying 25 Design Standard licenses every year..
James