Also... no one's forcing people to use their products. Photoshop doesn't have a patent on editing images. Lightroom doesn't have a patent on sorting through photo collections. Plenty of paid and free alternatives exist, they're just not as good. But it's a completely free market out there and Adobe can't stop you from building a better version of Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.

> Adobe can't stop you from building a better version of Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.

Make a serious dent in their business and they will damn sure try. Typically with lawfare.

When's the last time this happened?

> And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as upgrading every year.

Is it common for people to upgrade LR or similar software every year?

No. Were it common you wouldn't see such a large difference in profit between the rental and perpetually licensed versions of Lightroom. Aside from support for newer cameras new versions have few, if any, compelling features. Performance improvements (LR is slooooooow), improved noise reduction, improved handling of video or non-Bayer sensors… all of that mostly fell to the wayside in favor of things like that AI garbage, improved mobile integration, enhanced geolocation support.

Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people. It also included storage space and made it easy to take and edit images on any device. That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.

  Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people

lol, no.

The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is and always has been a separate "more accessible" product. Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible to Adobe.

  That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.

Of course it's the market now, there's no other option from Adobe.

As a frequent user, I certainly did.

  And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as
  upgrading every year.

lol, no.

Lightroom upgrades cost about $80. According to the wiki page Adobe rents Lightroom for $10/mo. That upgrade would only get me eight months of access.

  Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.

Sure, they've provided a ton of shareholder value for those subscriptions. Customer value? Not so much.

You’re assuming they would have never raised the upgrade pricing, which seems unlikely.

You’re assuming they will never raise the rental pricing, which seems unlikely.

And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady. Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license, etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.

If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom with all of their licensing software and incur the cost of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.