You can now rent your Adobe Suite

I tend not to like subscriptions. I like to buy my products and own them. Well, Adobe announced a subscription based model with the announcement of CS5.5. You can still outright buy the software. Although, if you don’t want to fork out the cash all at once, they have two subscription models. There is an annual with month-to-month payments and a no contract month-to-month plan. The advantage of the annual month-to-month is that your monthly fees are less, but you are locked into a year commitment. With the pure month-to-month model you pay about $40 more per month, but you have the ability to rent the software for discontinuous months. This is a nice option for someone who needs the software for a certain project, but might not use it after that.

The Adobe software calls a server every 30 days to get paid. If there is a problem with your credit card you get a 5 day grace period to resolve the issue. After that point the software stops working. Adobe will email 10 days before your credit card expires. If it does expire, Adobe will also email you after the fact.

Another side note, in addition the subscription model, Adobe announced a move to a 24 month release cycle. It was previously an 18 month release cycle. In my opinion the shorter release cycle always made it hard for people to upgrade. If you didn’t upgrade right away you felt like you weren't getting as much out of your investment.

One area that I think Adobe may have over looked was a rent to own policy. There is none. If you shell out $49 for a year ($588) for Photoshop and then you want to purchase it, you still have to pay the full $699.

This all seems to be in line with Adobe’s move towards downloads and maybe someday cloud service. Adobe has in recent year been encouraging people to download the software instead of buying the box. Hopefully someday we can access it all from the cloud, but I think we are still a long way off from that, at least with the Creative Suite.

To see a price chart of the product rentals versus purchase price visit: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20052152-1.html?tag=mncol;6n