Adobe slashes cloud pricing until August

To coincide with its decision last week to abandon shrink wrap and move all future sales of its Creative Suite to the Cloud, Adobe has introduced introduction pricing, cutting the annual cost of a Creative Cloud subscription from $840 a year to $480 until the end of August.

Under its new model Adobe has abandoned the tiered pricing model that its shrink wrap customers where familiar with for a single one-price-fits-all approach that enables its customers to get access to all the Creative Suite products plus additional services at an annual subscription price less than a quarter of the top tiered Creative Suite offering.

The compromise of course, is that users have lost the advantage of perpetual licensing.

Steve Martin, Adobe’s head of channel, Australia and New Zealand, told CRN that later this year Adobe will also enable customers to buy point solutions in the cloud, for those who don’t want or need the complete suite.  However, at $30 a month (averaged over twelve months) for a single product like Photoshop, the company has created  strong pricing incentive for users to buy the complete offering of  30 products in Creative for $70 a month.

Overwhelmingly Adobe’s revenue is derived through licence sales rather than retail shrink wrap and Martin said early reaction from its channel partners was positive.

He said he also expected retail to remain a strong and viable channel into the future even though he acknowledged a trend for individual customers to buy directly from Adobe.com.

“Retail especially is still great aggregation point. When customers go into a retail outlet to buy a PC or a Mac they still want to buy the other elements at the same time so they can take them home and get started.”

Interestingly, the single tier pricing for Creative Cloud also removes an important pain point for Adobe in the Australian market. During the federal government’s pricing enquiry Adobe became something of a whipping boy  for critics of pricing disparities between the US and Australia.

Now however the cloud pricing in the US and Australia is basically pegged for parity so that it costs $US80 a month in the States and $AU80 in Australia. That means that at least while the Aussie bounces above US $1 it is actually cheaper to buyer Creative Suite down under.

Individual users can pay for licences on a month basis on credit card, but corporate buyers of Creative Cloud for teams  need to buy 12 month subscriptions. However Martin pointed out that additional licences can be purchased by corporates on a pro rata basis during the one year subscription term  based on the customer’s anniversary date for their first licence purchase.