But I remember that you could keep the last version you subscribed to after subscription ended, which is way better (and the way Adobe products used to work).
I thought they let you use the version you used when you started subscribing, not then you ended the subscription? This was something a lot of people were upset about. That if you subscribe for a year and stop, you end up with a year old version.
You get the version at the time of your subscription (plus bugfixes). Then every time a version has been out for 12 months while you've been paying you get that version perpetually (plus bugfixes).
So it's 1.0 when you subscribe, you get that perpetually.
It's 1.0.1 in your third month, you get that perpetually.
It's 1.1 in your fifth month. You get that perpetually after 17 months.
It's 1.2 in your eighth month. You get that perpetually after 20 months.
You unsubscibe at 19 months but retain a perpetual version licence.
You started with 1.0
You ended with 1.2
You have to roll back from 1.2 to 1.1
Previous version was incorrect. This is why I just distribute our licenses, not procure them!
If paying on a monthly basis, as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started. You will receive perpetual fallback licenses for every version you’ve paid 12 consecutive months for.
So, in your example, you unsubscribe in month 15. This means, you paid 14 months so you get to retain the version from month three (which is 12 full paid months to 14). This means a downgrade to 1.0.x and not to 1.2.x
Oh, I don't know which way around it is then actually. I've not subscribed before, but a colleague does so it's possible I've misheard or misinterpreted what he said
Really difficult indeed, subscribed to the student sub a while ago, was cheap compared to normal prices for the whole suite. However getting out of the deal was forcing me to pay up the rest of the yearly subscription price, yo could get around this by downgrading the subscription to photoshop only and then it would let you cancel without any additional payments. Such a shitty dark pattern to do but it’s Adobe so it’s expected 🤷
And on top of that, latest versions of their tools are always free until the next release ( which is every 2-3 months ).
Their words when i talked to them on some convention.
Subscriptions are bad as hell, but jetbrains is doing them alright imo
So real answer time on subs from the Adobe side. Albeit not popular.
The real reason for subscription based licencing is push updates based on new tech with Adobe. Back in the day you had to wait for a new version of Premiere/Photoshop etc to support new camera codecs or new features like background proxy generation. This had to do with what's considered a new software package and software patent law with how you pay devs.
So you pay for features ABC for version 10. And pay for features ABCDE in version 11. But it you're paying a subscription service they can "live" update the produt to rollout ABCDEFGH constantly as they're ready to ship.
Yeah it's basically Adobe being cheap and not wanting to pay their devs better and for that I definitely agree fuck sub models. But for us professionals live updates in post is a godsend and also allowed our camera and production tech to upgrade at breakneck speeds.
At the end of the day Adobe is the best choice because the alternatives are mostly not software dev and UI focused. And they are on top of their game tech wise. So we're pretty much at their mercy on how they wanna charge us. I'm always excited to see what BMD is doing with DaVinci Resolve - the best pro color grading software out there btw. They've been pushing their NLE editing package of the software hard and is free, highly recommend. Would love to see them overtake Adobe like Adobe overtook Avid.
At the end of the day Adobe is the best choice because the alternatives are mostly not software dev and UI focused.
They're probably also the only professional game in town because they patent every single UX enhancement. And with IP laws favouring no one but the biggest cheese, they cripple their competition by calling dibs on sensible UX ideas.