Thoughts on Adobe’s New $10/month License for Photoshop CC.

Responding to criticism, Adobe now offers a long-term Photoshop CC license for $10 a month.

Here’s the math for this new license fee, as it applies to my own Photoshop history. (I’ve never bought the entire CS suite, just the non-Extended Photoshop.) Obviously, those with different Adobe suites or different upgrade habits will have different numbers.

Over the past six years, Photoshop upgrades have been released at anything from every 18 months to every 23 months. Starting in April 2007 I’ve upgraded Photoshop four times at the least expensive price I could find, typically paying Adobe’s upgrade price with a Photoshop users’ group discount. I paid from $180 to (most recently) $223.

Thus over the past 76 months I paid a total of $815 to use Photoshop.

That means that, on average for the past six years, I’ve paid an average of less than $11 a month to use Photoshop.

Thus if I subscribe now at this new license fee of $10 per month, I’ll actually pay slightly less than what I’ve been paying to use Photoshop for the past 6 years.

That doesn’t seem so bad.