A colleague forwarded me an email from Adobe this morning. Our Creative Cloud for teams subscription is renewing next month, and the price is going up — again.
Adobe has renamed Creative Cloud All Apps to “Creative Cloud Pro” and set the new teams price at $99.99 per month per license, plus applicable sales tax. The justification: “unlimited standard AI generations,” access to premium video and audio AI features, and integration with third-party models like Google Imagen 3 and OpenAI’s image generation through the Firefly app.
The rebrand happened in June 2025. Anyone who hasn’t renewed since then is seeing it now.
The Price Trajectory
This isn’t the first increase. Adobe raised Creative Cloud for teams pricing to $84.99/month in 2022, then to $89.99 in 2023. Now $99.99. That’s an 18% increase over three years on a product that many organizations already considered expensive.
For a team of three licenses — our situation — that’s $299.97 per month before tax, or roughly $3,600 per year. For what started as a collection of creative applications.
What They’re Selling
The justification for the increase centers almost entirely on AI. Unlimited generative fill in Photoshop. Text-to-video in the Firefly web app. Access to partner models from Google and OpenAI. Collaborative AI mood boards. These are real features, and for creative professionals who use them daily, they may justify the cost.
But the email is going to IT directors and team administrators — people who have to evaluate whether three seats of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro are worth $3,600 a year. The AI features are additive. The core applications are the same ones we were already paying for.
The Competitive Landscape Has Changed
What’s different in 2026 is that the alternatives are no longer compromises.
Affinity — acquired by Canva in 2024 — went completely free in late 2025. Not a trial. Not a stripped-down version. The full professional suite: photo editing, vector illustration, and desktop publishing. Canva’s business model subsidizes it — more professionals on Affinity means more Canva for Teams seats sold into organizations. But the tools themselves are unrestricted. No subscription, no internet connection required.
Figma dominates UI/UX design with an estimated 80–90% market share in that segment. It’s browser-based, collaborative by default, and has eaten into Adobe’s relevance for web and product design work.
DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic Design offers professional-grade video editing — the free version handles most workflows, and the Studio version is a one-time $295 purchase. No subscription.
Canva itself has grown into a legitimate design platform, not just a template tool. At $120 per year for a team seat, it covers a wide range of what non-specialist users need from Adobe.
Adobe still holds roughly 58% of the creative software market. That share is earned — Photoshop and Premiere Pro remain industry standards for a reason. But the gap between “industry standard” and “good enough” has narrowed significantly, and the cost difference has widened.
The Broader Pattern
Adobe isn’t alone in this. SaaS companies across the board are raising prices and rebranding existing tiers to justify the increases. AI features get bundled into products whether customers asked for them or not, and the bill goes up. I’ve written about this pattern before — the SaaS model that once promised predictable costs has become a mechanism for unpredictable price escalation.
The timing is notable. Adobe’s stock is down roughly 37% over the past year. CEO Shantanu Narayen announced on March 12 — the same week these renewal emails went out — that he’ll step down after 18 years once a successor is named. The company is simultaneously raising prices on existing customers while navigating a leadership transition and an investor narrative that questions whether Adobe can compete in the AI era.
The Evaluation
Every organization with an Adobe renewal coming up should be asking the same question: do we need everything in this bundle, and if so, is there a cheaper way to get it?
For teams that live in Photoshop and Premiere Pro eight hours a day, the answer might still be yes. Those applications have deep, specialized capabilities that alternatives don’t fully replicate. But for teams that use Creative Cloud for occasional design work, light video editing, or document creation — which describes a lot of the seats Adobe sells — $1,200 a year per license is increasingly hard to justify when capable alternatives exist at a fraction of the cost, or for free.
The email asks us to see $99.99 as the price of innovation. The question every Adobe customer should be asking is whether we’re paying for innovation we actually use.