So let’s do a quick thought experiment… Try to imagine the perfect design and page layout tool, in a world unrestricted by technological limitations, where anything was possible. That’s a pretty big deal! If you’re still thinking the cost of InDesign is what you pay Adobe each month, you may not have fully grasped the significance of this. It’s quite possible you pay a designer the same amount per hour that you pay for the software over a whole month. And the cost of renting a human very much exceeds the cost of renting the software-even relatively expensive professional software like InDesign. What does InDesign actually do? What does it contribute to your business? You might start by saying, ‘It enables our designers to…’, or ‘ We use it to…’ See, the thing is, like a carpenter’s hammer, or an artist’s brush, InDesign does nothing at all until you connect a human to it. So if I asked you, what does InDesign cost your business, what would you say? $20.99 USD per month? A little more or less perhaps, depending on your local currency and the kind of plan you’re on? But love it or hate it, the monthly subscription model, at the very least, spreads your payments out evenly over the year and makes it easier to see and predict what the cost is to your business. As a keen user of InDesign since version 1.0 (and an Adobe customer for some years before that) I was not a fan of their decision to switch to subscription-only pricing.

Much has been said and written about Adobe’s decision to stop selling perpetual licences for InDesign (and all its other creative apps) back in 2013. Why Adobe InDesign might be costing you more money than you think

Indesign cost