Adobe’s Insane Pricing

June 14, 2010

Adobe CS5 Master Collection So you want to buy Adobe’s CS5 Master Collection do you? Well if you’re American that’ll set you back a cool $2,599USD which isn’t a bad price considering the amount of software in the bundle. Adobe really do have the market cornered, there are plenty of options when it comes to coding, but if you’re looking to design – you really will need at least one of the following Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks and/or InDesign.

Should you want to pick up a copy of CS5 Master Collection in the UK then you can expect to pay £2,706.02GBP. Now I know that the pound isn’t particularly strong against the dollar at the moment but I have to say that is completely ridiculous. A quick conversion (using Google’s current exchange rate) of the US price to pounds comes out at £1767.32, which means that UK customers are paying almost £1,000 more than customers in the US. Am I the only one that finds this a little bit unfair?

5 Responses to “Adobe’s Insane Pricing”

Ben Smith
June 14th, 2010 at 11:52 am

This is something that has always bothered me too. That’s a huge difference in price, I’d be interested to know if there is a valid justification for the disparity, such as taxes over here.

Another thing that I can’t understand is that you actually have to pay more to buy the digital downloadable version as opposed to the boxed CD-set which they would have to post out to you.
Pat
June 14th, 2010 at 2:57 pm

I’m an American who recently purchased a CMS from an English vendor. I paid only the pound-to-USD conversion price, and not the VAT, which I think is between 15%-17%.

That still doesn’t explain the price differential to which your article refers. Obama is ruining the US economy, and no one here has any money. So perhaps Adobe is taking pity upon poor, distraught American web designers. It doesn’t affect me, as Adobe products are generally w-a-y too expensive for my purse.
Edd
June 14th, 2010 at 10:56 pm

So this is Adobe’s excuse, sorry I mean justification – “The cost of doing business in UK and Europe is significantly higher per unit of revenue earned than it is in North America,” David Gingell, Adobe’s senior marketing manager for EMEA, told ZDNet UK. “For example, in a large homogenous market like North America, we can achieve certain economies of scale that affect pricing. In the European Union, by contrast, we must support two major currencies, diverse regional market situations and 15 languages, all of which results in higher costs.”

So apparently because we don’t use the Euro and there are only a few million users as opposed to 10s of millions and there’s a ‘diverse market’ (aren’t all global markets diverse?) we’re getting it in the neck/pocket!?
Blogged It
February 26th, 2011 at 9:14 am

and they are wondering why adobe products is one of the most pirated around. But you can’t complain when there is no competition.
matt
June 4th, 2011 at 6:52 pm

Can we get a list of companies that will not buy/upgrade this product, so we can start a partition to the useless heads at adobe Australia/Europe to get better pricing… I know of someone that has stopped designing and gone into alternative business due to every changing software to be learnt (with no support) + price to be paid for upgrades of such software… aka adobe… LIST IS GOOD////// EDIT OF FUCK IT GETS WORSE NOW THEY WANT YEARLY OR MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTIONS which is even higher pricing then before…… off to the bay I go