Adobe’s AI tools may paint a pretty picture, but they also cost a pretty penny

Adobe has sprinkled its products with AI while also hiking prices to pay for all that generative goodness.

Prices paid by some subscribers are set to rise by just under 10 percent depending on the plan type.

For example, the All Apps plan is to increase by $5 a month from $54.99 to $59.99 for the annual billed monthly option. The annual prepaid option will set you back $60 with a jump from $599.88 to $659.88.

The annual billed monthly option for the Creative Cloud for individual Single App plan will rise by $2 a month from $20.99 to $22.99.

The increase for Creative Cloud for Teams is lower, at around five per cent. The Teams All Apps plan, for example, will increase by $5 from $84.99 to $89.99 per month per license.

The company justified the hikes by claiming “an unprecedented number of creative capabilities” in its suite and “new costs associated with generative AI content creation.”

We’re sure creatives will be overjoyed to pay a bit more so that Adobe can better handle AI costs.

Adobe Express Premium and Adobe Firefly are being inserted into the membership of Creative Cloud customers. According to Adobe, the former is an all-in-one creativity app, while the latter is the company’s pitch for AI-assisted creative expression.

The Firefly technology can currently be found in Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Stock, and Adobe Express. It is also a standalone application capable of all manner of image wizardry based on little more than a text prompt.

While Firefly itself is hardly a new idea – having images produced based on text has launched a thousand memes – Adobe’s approach to monetization and integration bears further investigation.

The model behind Firefly comes from a dataset of Adobe Stock, alongside openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe also announced a bonus for contributors to Adobe Stock based on the number of approved images submitted between June 3, 2022, and June 2, 2023.

The bonus will be paid once per year and is weighted toward the number of licenses issued for an image. The next Firefly bonus is due in 2024.

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In the future, Adobe intends for the technology to be used with everyday language to perform a range of design variations in combination with the rest of the Creative Cloud toolset. It is also considering how users might train Firefly’s model with their own assets.

However, all this AI fun comes at a cost, and Firefly is no exception.

Adobe is using a credit-based system for the use of its tools. Using Generative Fill, Generative Expand, Text to Image, and Generative Recolor will cost one credit. Text Effects are free until November 1 and will cost one credit after that.

The fee also applies to images up to 2,000 x 2,000 pixels. The company plans to go higher in the future, although the cost could well be more significant.

As for the cost of credits, it depends on your plan. Free users get 25 credits per month. $4.99 per month gets 100 credits and no watermarks on images generated by Firefly.

Creative Cloud subscribers will get more monthly generative credits – the full-blown Creative Cloud All Apps plan, for example, receives 1,000 credits.

Adobe also stated that Creative Cloud, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express, and Adobe Stock paid subscribers wouldn’t be subject to generative credit limits until November 1, 2023. ®