CC App Price increases announced (may be able to avoid)

[Califdan]

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2. Windows 8
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12. macOS 15 Sequoia
13. iOS
14. iPadOS
15. Android

Adobe announced some price increases effective when your plan next renews but you may be able to avoid the price increase by changing your billing cycle.

See this page for the full announcement (the price part is near the bottom)
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/12/15/all-new-photography-innovations-pricing-updates

Here’s a summary of the changes

 

[Victoria Bampton]

It's just that it seemed like I could continue monthly until the end of my current contract, and then upon renewal time, pick up with a yearly plan. That made me wonder if I'd be able to keep the same pricing because it was past the Jan. 15 deadline.

Yes that’s absolutely fine, the new pricing doesn’t come in until your renewal, and Adobe says you’ll still be able to switch to annual at that point.

 

[Gnits]

Update.

I had Lr since beta, bought product on launch and then bought every upgrade. Subscribed to PhotoPlan when it became available.

A few days ago I checked my account status. My plan was annual/ paid monthly. My account page provided no option to change to annual in advance. I decided to wait a few days. Checked again this afternoon. No change.

So… I contact Adobe Support via Chat. Explained that I wanted to pay annual in advance. The support guy explained that I would need to cancel my existing plan (scary) and create a new plan, based on annual payment in advance.

I was asked if I wanted to do that. I agreed. The support person looked after everything. Cancelled the old, created a new, sent me a link to fill in credit card details for the new plan and then linked my new plan to my account. Painless and very efficient.

I have just received an email confirming the new plan is in place and that I have a cooling off period until 3rd of Jan (which I do not need).

This removed any doubt in my mind that I am now on the Photo Plan… annual in advance at @120 € per annum plus tax.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Painless and very efficient.

Thanks for sharing Matt. Adobe support gets a bad name (for good reason!!), but they’re great on account issues, especially as they’re doing so many of this transfer at the moment.

 

[Gnits]

I just thought that there may be a lot of people like me who are on a monthly in advance and want absolute clarity on their status going forward.

My renewal date is next Sep…. and did not want to be wondering every month what was going to happen or what I would need to do to change.

My experience was painless and quick.

When I went onto Chat the initial response was from a robot… but a real person took over almost immediately.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Excellent idea @Gnits. I’ve heard that typing agent into the chat box gets you to a person straight away, in case it helps anyone

 

[Swingman]

By the way, Adobe is still trying sign up new people to their 20GB Photography as I suspected by the 15th January date.
I was making an enquiry regarding when the iPad version would get denoise and he politely replied that they were not given when it would be released. I also asked would the iPad version of Photoshop get it as well. He suggested that he could sign me up for a new 20GB Photography Plan and that would allow me to access Photoshop’s denoise from iPad.`


My take on this new pricing structure to make Adobe more profitable. Their 15% increase in profit announced earlier this month, their share price dropped by 10% after hours and hence the decision to improve profit margin.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Signing people up for the 20GB plan before it’s withdrawn is in the customers interests, so no complaints from me if they’re still pushing it.

My take on this new pricing structure to make Adobe more profitable. Their 15% increase in profit announced earlier this month, their share price dropped by 10% after hours and hence the decision to improve profit margin.

Everything that companies do is always to make them more profitable, I think that’s capitalism. That said, this price change has been in the works for at least months, if not years. A company this big can’t act that quickly to react to share changes!

 

[clee01l]

Everything that companies do is always to make them more profitable, I think that’s capitalism. That said, this price change has been in the works for at least months, if not years. A company this big can’t act that quickly to react to share changes!

The "bean counters" I'm sure were looking at the overhead of managing a monthly subscription on an annual plan versus a once a year payment on an annual plan. It would be interesting to know what percentage of the Photography plan Customers were on the monthly or annual payment structure.

 

[Gnits]

I know from experience that once a product is launched into the world it generates a life of its own. Strategies are built around its customer base, part of a portfolio of products, its base technology and the need to maintain, revenue streams , etc. Organisations also change, including product managers, company direction, skills needed to maintain a product, etc. Over time, views are formed on how to streamline support for the product and seek options to minimise overheads, even if the product is successful.

Apart from all of that, in the current world… managing credit card payments is high maintenance and to do so 12 times a year is 12 times worse. Thru no fault of my own.. my bank have replaced my credit card 3 times in the last year… ie a different number, expiry date and code. It happened to me again this week. I asked my bank why they issued a new card, while there was nearly a year left…. They replied that they just wanted to build in more security to my card… that my old card would continue to work at a retail outlet, but would not work for web payments. I will change my credit card details (again) on many of my most used web accounts, but there will be a bunch I either forget about or wish to fade away. Adobe have to handle all of these declined payments…

So for lots of reasons… I can understand a desire to remove a monthly payment scheme with a single annual payment.

I am not going to over-think this. Adobe promised to keep the price of the PhotoPlan at its launch price for as long as possible. They have kept their promise to me.

It just took me a bit of time to figure out how to handle the admin needed to get my account settings in order.

 

[PhilBurton]

My take on this new pricing structure to make Adobe more profitable. Their 15% increase in profit announced earlier this month, their share price dropped by 10% after hours and hence the decision to improve profit margin.

I thought I could retain my yearly subscription, no problem, until I read Gnits' post #79 in this thread. Now I have to double check.

Big companies don't just raise prices as a kneejerk reaction to a change in the share price. There is always some amount of "competitive analysis" comparing the current and proposed prices vs. the prices and feature set of competitors. the price increase and the share price drop occurring at the same time is just a coincidence.

 

[Swingman]

I thought I could retain my yearly subscription, no problem, until I read Gnits' post #79 in this thread. Now I have to double check.

Big companies don't just raise prices as a kneejerk reaction to a change in the share price. There is always some amount of "competitive analysis" comparing the current and proposed prices vs. the prices and feature set of competitors. the price increase and the share price drop occurring at the same time is just a coincidence.

As Victoria said, that the big companies don’t do this at the whim, the share price dropped might have accelerated the time table.
Also the competition had already had many more price increases in the last ten twelve years. I used to be a DXO user and now the upgrade price is about 3 times of what it was ten years ago. I stopped using it even though it is a perpetual licence, unless one stick to the same gear it becomes worthless.
As a hobbyist and retired it’s too expensive to renew their subscription.
Kudos to Adobe, even after this change is still extremely competitive and sure they won’t be loosing any customers .

 

[dkperez]

I'm HOPING to make this as painless as possible, but I must be missing something that’s intuitive to everyone else, 'cause can’t figure out HOW to change from the MONTHLY photography plan changed to the ANNUAL plan. I read a bunch of the earlier responses and I still have NO idea what Adobe is actually doing or which hoops I need to jump through to keep this ^%$#@!~ basic plan working without disruption.

I currently have a photography plan. It SAYS I have an ordinary plan with Photoshop, Lightroom, 100GB of Cloud storage, and 500 monthly AI credits. I pay MONTHLY at $9.99. I don’t know HOW it decided I have 100GB of cloud storage OR how I got 500 monthly AI credits, but the adobe page SAYS that’s what I currently have.

From what I’ve seen in the Adobe Creative Cloud Plans and Pricing, I will have to change to the 20GB plan with 100 monthly AI credits to stay at $119.88/year (9.99/mo). So there is a degradation to the plan with the loss of cloud storage and AI credits, but I don’t use much Cloud Storage and don’t currently extensively use (hopefully not more than 100/mo) of AI credits. My plan is to downgrade to the $119.88/year and prepay the year rather than being billed monthly.

I don’t appear to be able to DO this.

On the Plans and pricing page for Creative Cloud apps (individual) I found:

On THIS page I went to the “Photography (20GB)” option and clicked on “See all plans & pricing details”. This is the ONLY place I have found the option to select the annual plan.

I can SELECT the Annual, prepaid plan as shown, and if I understand correctly, I SHOULD be able to select the annual, prepaid plan for $119.88 with 20GB of cloud storage and 100 monthly generative credits.

When I press Continue on this page, I get a popup that says:

At this point I’ve found NO way to switch from the monthly to the annual plan. View Other Plans just dumps me back to the original “Plans and pricing” page.

Do I HAVE to just stand by and WAIT for Adobe to notify me that my current plan is ending before I can switch to the annual plan? If SO, can someone tell me WHERE to find the date my CURRENT plan will end?

I can find my next MONTH date, but I have NO idea when this “annual, billed monthly” plan will end.

 

[Gnits]

I suggest you do what I did.
Log Into Your Adobe Account. On the bottom right of my main account page there is a tiny label which says something like…”Contact Adobe”.

This should open a Chat Robot. I asked a question… but another suggestion is type in ‘agent’.

A real Adobe person responded and I was able to ask how to transform my paid monthly to paid annual Photo plan. The agent answered and then did all the work behind the scenes.

Your case is more complex…. so all the more reason to talk directly to an Adobe agent directly.

 

[dkperez]

I was REALLY hoping to avoid having to deal with the quagmire of Adobe support... Can someone at least tell me HOW to find the date my current plan will expire? I can find the date of the next monthly payment, but haven't found the plan renewal date.

 

[Paul McFarlane]

Go to https://account.adobe.com/ (and log in)

Under Billing and Payment it will tell you your billing type (for example, Annual Plan paid monthly) and the next due payment date.

 

[Zenon]

I was REALLY hoping to avoid having to deal with the quagmire of Adobe support... Can someone at least tell me HOW to find the date my current plan will expire? I can find the date of the next monthly payment, but haven't found the plan renewal date.

Open CC app. Click on the circle in the upper right hand corner. Mine is blue. Click on the bigger circle. Click in Overview and then Manage Plan.

 

[clee01l]

I was REALLY hoping to avoid having to deal with the quagmire of Adobe support..

I believe some one here has stated that Adobe Support is the best prepared to handle with these subscription changes. Most support is scriptied and depending upon the issue, a well scripted issue like subscriptions are easily resolved.

 

[Zenon]

I rarely have anything bad to say about Adobe. Even when they named LrC and Lr it didn't bother me a bit. It seem to me once again they shot themselves in the foot. I came across and Anthony Morganti video saying if you don't lock your price price by Jan 15th then you will pay the higher rate when your plan expires. Other photo websites are posting that as well. There are quite a few people out there switching that don't need to. They will be a little ticked if they find out they didn't need to. However it won't cost them anymore. If a plan was to expire lets say by April 2025 and that person switched to the annual paid up front plan today they would not have to pay a penalty from now until April for the previous plan. You just start a new contract and your pay for the year plan just starts a little earlier.

It seems that first post by Dan just does not mention Jan 15 as far as I can see but somehow other sites that posted that date stirred things up a bit.

I'm going by this which Victoria posted and what Adobe told me. I've bookmarked it, opened line #3 and took a screen shot. I've got until November, 2025.

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cl..._source=partnerize&as_campaign=lightroomqueen

 

[camner]

Thanks for the clarification on this, Victoria. I've actually tried to upgrade my 20gb monthly plan to yearly and I get the following messages:
When I continue to verification, I get the error message:


Does this seem right to you, that is, Adobe won't allow me to go to a yearly plan until my monthly contract has ended (whenever that may be)?

Ed

Just chat with support. I couldn’t find a way to do it online, so I chatted with support and the support agent did what I couldn’t (don’t know if it is that I couldn’t or it couldn’t be done at the time I tried).

 

[camner]

Same FAQ but updated today on .com so the localised versions may not be updated yet. As long as your subscription hasn’t expired, you’ll still be an existing subscription rather than a new one.

That’s not what chat support told me. They told me they would have to cancel my existing 20GB paid monthly plan and start up a new 20 GB paid yearly plan. And, that’s what happened. Perhaps the support agent was wrong that this approach was necessary.

 

[camner]

Update.

I had Lr since beta, bought product on launch and then bought every upgrade. Subscribed to PhotoPlan when it became available.

A few days ago I checked my account status. My plan was annual/ paid monthly. My account page provided no option to change to annual in advance. I decided to wait a few days. Checked again this afternoon. No change.

So… I contact Adobe Support via Chat. Explained that I wanted to pay annual in advance. The support guy explained that I would need to cancel my existing plan (scary) and create a new plan, based on annual payment in advance.

I was asked if I wanted to do that. I agreed. The support person looked after everything. Cancelled the old, created a new, sent me a link to fill in credit card details for the new plan and then linked my new plan to my account. Painless and very efficient.

I have just received an email confirming the new plan is in place and that I have a cooling off period until 3rd of Jan (which I do not need).

This removed any doubt in my mind that I am now on the Photo Plan… annual in advance at @120 € per annum plus tax.

This is EXACTLY what happened with me. No way I could see to do it myself online, no problem doing it with support.

 

[Zenon]

That’s not what chat support told me. They told me they would have to cancel my existing 20GB paid monthly plan and start up a new 20 GB paid yearly plan. And, that’s what happened. Perhaps the support agent was wrong that this approach was necessary.

My Adobe support person told me the opposite. I guess I'll let you know in November of 2025. I'm confident as I have documentation directly from Adobe. I'll never pay $15 anyway. If somehow that happens it will by bye bye Adobe but I'm pretty sure they will want to keep me around.

 

[camner]

I was REALLY hoping to avoid having to deal with the quagmire of Adobe support... Can someone at least tell me HOW to find the date my current plan will expire? I can find the date of the next monthly payment, but haven't found the plan renewal date.

You are spending a lot of time trying to avoid contacting Support. The experience of a couple of us (at least) here on this forum was that Support handled the change swiftly and correctly!

(I do admit that given my past poor experience with Adobe Support, my initial reaction not being able to do it myself was, “Oh #$%&, I have to contact support,” but to my (very) pleasant surprise, it was as painless an experience as I’ve had with ANY support in the last few years; I find that increasingly, as AI takes over from live people, the word “support” is less and less apt).

 

[Zenon]

You are spending a lot of time trying to avoid contacting Support. The experience of a couple of us (at least) here on this forum was that Support handled the change swiftly and correctly!

Yeah. I had support on the line in about a minute.

 

[Gnits]

I did not need to phone support or wait for an agent to be available. I used the chat feature… agent understood, asked me to confirm what I wanted, confirmed the pricing going forward, I agreed.. and a few seconds later an email arrived confirming my change to Annual Photo Plan rather than Monthly Photo Plan. (Ps. This is my last comment on this topic.).