Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

Creative Cloud Pro arrives with more AI, higher prices, and a familiar feeling of déjà vu

New generative AI products mean new higher prices for individual Adobe Creative Cloud customers, unless they downgrade to a version with fewer features.

Less than two years after Adobe hiked prices for Creative Cloud All Apps customers, the Photoshop giant has done it again. This time, however, it isn't just increasing prices – Adobe is also renaming Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro.

But it doesn't end there. In a move evocative of the latest season of Black Mirror, those who don't want to pay more for the same thing – plus a handful of new video and audio generative AI features – are free to downgrade to Creative Cloud Standard, provided they take action to do so before their next billing cycle.

Pricing for the current Creative Cloud All Apps plan (due to be replaced by CC Pro) costs an individual $59.99 a month if billed annually, and $89.99 a month without a yearly contract (the only way to cancel an Adobe subscription early). Customers who do nothing before the June 17 deadline and automatically convert to CC Pro will see their prices increase to $69.99 per month with a yearly contract, or a whopping $104.99 per month without an annual agreement. Teacher and student plans for CC Pro will run at $29.99 a month for the first year with an annual contract, and will increase to $39.99 per month after the first year of service. Student and teacher deals aren't available for CC Standard. 

Users who take the effort to downgrade to Standard will save a few bucks off the price of the old CC All Apps plan - Standard runs $54.99 a month with an annual contract or $82.99 for a month-to-month plan - but it's a bit of a devil's bargain, as Standard users will lose access to some of the things they were previously paying for with CC All Apps.

Take generative AI credits, for example. CC All Apps customers currently get 1,000 generative AI credits to do things like generative fill, generative expand, text-to-image, and the like. CC Pro users will get 4,000 credits per month once the new tier rolls out, while CC Standard users will get only 25.

Those 25 credits (the same number that free users received under the 2023 pricing strategy) will be usable for AI feature that already exist, like those mentioned above, but not for any of the new AI features that Adobe announced last week (e.g. 4K video generation, text-to-video/audio, etc.) – these are exclusive to CC Pro subscribers.

Additionally, it appears those who rely on Adobe's mobile Creative Cloud apps but don't want to pay for CC Pro are out of luck, too. According to the pricing changes site, CC Standard users will retain full access to Adobe Acrobat on mobile and the web, but everything else is restricted to "free features only."

In short, individuals should be prepared to start paying more for the same service with a few new AI bells and whistles – the same trick Adobe pulled in 2023. Notably, these pricing and plan changes apply only to North American customers; the rest of the world gets a reprieve. Corporate pricing changes are not part of this announcement.

Adobe only directed us to the announcement on the new pricing that it published last week when asked questions for this story. ®