The Adobe transition to a subscription-based business model has been successful by many measures, but it doesn’t meet every customer’s needs. If you want Adobe software but you don’t want to pay a regular subscription fee, do you still have options? Depending on what you need, the answer is “maybe”and as of 2017, the non-subscription options are fewer than ever.
Just to get some terms out of the way, the conventional way to pay for software is called a perpetual license, because you buy the license once and it doesn’t expire. With Adobe Creative Cloud you maintain your license to use Adobe software and services by paying a subscription fee every year or every month, as you might with Netflix or Spotify. Update: CS6 no longer available as of January 9, 2017 As of January 9, 2017, Creative Suite (CS6 or earlier) perpetual license applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe After Effects are no longer available for sale from Adobe (see below). They are now only available as part of a paid Creative Cloud subscription. Many Creative Cloud applications have a Single App subscription option in case you don’t want to pay for them all. If you read an earlier version of this article that talked about how to buy CS6 without a subscription, I’ve now had to bring this article up to date to account for Adobe taking CS6 completely off the market.
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