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Price increase of 600% for Production Premium for our college
I wanted to raise an issue regarding educational pricing for my institution. We are a small department, with a CLP license agreement for multiple seats of Production Premium. This year, I converted my program from Macs to PCs, and from an FCP/AE workflow to a Premiere/AE workflow. One of the main reasons was Apple’s dramatic changes, including the very disappointing FCPX.
Another reason for the switch was Adobe’s aggressive pricing for education. After buying our original seats for our CLP license, we were able to purchase maintenance licenses every two years. At a cost of about $150 for a 2-year contract, we got all of the updates to all of the products in the Production Premium. That works out to about $6.25 per month, per seat.
We recently learned that Adobe has cancelled its maintenance licensing, and once our current contract ends this summer, we will not be allowed to renew it. Any new releases after that, we will have to pay full price for. After numerous frustrating calls to Adobe, and Adobe sales reps, the only alternative I am offered is the Creative Cloud, at a cost of $39.95 per month.
That is a price increase of over 600%, and is not even close to an option for us. We are a small college with a small budget, and cannot possibly afford to keep current with the software unless Adobe drastically reduces this rate for us. We understand that the CC gives you the full Master Collection, but that does not really help us any more than offering a filet mignon to a vegetarian. We are strictly a video production program, and Production Premium includes everything we need. Thus far, Adobe has made no mention of offering other smaller subscription options for education, or any replacement for their maintenance license program.
I can understand Adobe’s desire to go to a cloud based subscription solution, and I frankly have no problem with that. But how can they possibly justify jacking their prices up so severely on a loyal segment of their customer base.
Of course everyone’s licensing costs are slightly different, but this seems to be about the same situation I am finding with other educational customers in the same boat. Does anyone else have a CLP license agreement? Do you have a maintenance contract? What’s your plan when it runs out?
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
4 Replies
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You can still buy the discs of the Adobe software at EDU prices…you don’t have to marry the cloud! 😉 I’m sure somewhere from Adobe can chime in on your post, but I’m an EDU purchaser as well and I don’t buy into the Creative Cloud. I just buy the good old fashioned discs from Adobe at traditional EDU pricing.
Their educational portal still points you to several educational volume pricing options: https://www.adobe.com/volume-licensing/education.html
If nothing else just purchase the software from a reseller that deals with edu pricing:
https://www.journeyed.com
https://www.govconnection.com
https://www.academicsuperstore.comI’ve even bought stuff from Amazon and B&H Photo for the school at correct educational prices.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
And yes, we can still buy the perpetual licenses at a discount, but we were only able to make the budget work with the maintenance license. With no upgrade pricing, and no maintenance, even at the low price point of $400 for a Production Premium seat, I would still be paying for the equivalent of 6 years of maintenance licensing (which is about $75 per year, per seat) each time they updated the software, just to stay current. They are obviously going to update more frequently than every 6 years (at least I sure hope they will), so I am definitely still looking at a significant price increase to stay current.
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
Hi Guys,
To be clear about the way maintenance giving you upgrade rights on top of the original purchase and how the creative cloud offering works – the per seat fee for Master Collection (which is platform agnostic! being on a Mac or PC the same account access knows which installer you require), with other services including training videos across the entire toolset, a space for social from behance (coming) and free new feature based upgrades drops (can be as frequent as per month if they are ready to drop) is in the constant pricing model that’s subscribed to the plan.
The cost of per seat is locked in and can be budgeted in forecasts. Getting Team allows you to allow access to students based on an admin assigned sign in and when students leave, graduate that account is closed and reassigned. Seats can be scaled mid-way too.
CLP licenses won’t have access to the new feature rich (innovation based) updates – legally. This meant in the past that updates of this nature required waiting until a full year/18month cycle was released before the features could be passed on at the extra cost.
The Cloud based subscription bypasses the innovation lag.
So effectively $40 per seat is $40 per seat even when a major update drops. If you a in subscription timeframe you effectively have maintenance built into the price.
From the sites I saw you would otherwise be paying about $600 for the Prod Premium only software, then the maintenance on top. If the students want to learn where video goes across digital publishing, web etc, you need to buy more software. This is just software there are no extended services included in this product line.
Reapply the mathematics knowing the maintenance is included in the pricing and consider the extent of allowing students access to the software on their computers too. They get access to 2 Adobe Expert lessons per seat/year and 100G of cloud based storage.
Hope this helps a little more about understanding the value of Creative Cloud.
🙂
JB
Adobe Systems,
Video Solutoins Consultatnt, A/NZJon Barrie
Adobe Video Solutions Consultant ANZ
Jon’s YouTube Tutorial Page
follow Jon with twitter -
I understand how it works, and everything you mention sounds great. Except for the price. The fact that there is no longer an upfront cost means little to us, because we have already paid the upfront costs of the perpetual license. We retain our license when the student leaves, and can then re-assign it to another of our students when they join the program. Since the computers are portable, they ARE using them at home, even though they actually belong to the college until the day they graduate or leave the school otherwise. All this, we are already receiving, but for only $6.25 a month. I know it is only software, but that is truly only what we need, and more importantly, what we can afford. Are you suggesting that the extras you mention are worth over $33 per month? They certainly are not worth that to us.
I think the Cloud is a great idea, but your pricing structure is exploitative to educators as compared to your previous licensing system. And frankly, we will NEVER be able to afford it, which leaves us with 2 choices: Keep using our old stuff, or look elsewhere. Adobe used to be a company that valued its educational users by aggressively discounting their products 75-80% over the commercial prices. That’s why we chose Adobe in the first place. This will also be the reason we STOP using Adobe products if this new policy is not improved. To keep with your traditional aggressive educational pricing, you should be offering the Creative Cloud for about $10-12 per month.
If this new pricing structure is such a great deal, then why kill the old system so quickly? If it is such a great deal, people would certainly flock to the new system and abandon the one we’ve been using. But Adobe’s decision to quickly kill the old licensing system, shows that they know they are screwing over their educational customers. I noticed that Adobe still offers “Upgrade Plan” for CLP licensees on the commercial side, but not education.
I think it’s pretty obvious that Adobe no longer wants to court education with the aggressive discounts that they used to. How long do you think that educational institutions are going to support Adobe when you jack up the prices so much so fast?
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee
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