*** From the Archives ***
This article is from July 14, 2008, and is no longer current.
Upsells vs. Upgrades. What to Buy.
If what I see on the User to User forums is any indication there seems to be some confusion out there concerning upgrades. Let’s get the definitions out of the way which will hopefully save some folks a bit of grief when deciding what to buy.
Upsell. An upsell allows the purchaser to buy a new product license using a license from an earlier version of different product. An example of that would be using a Photoshop license to purchase a Creative Suite license. The upsell price on the suites is about $200 less than the full retail price.
Upgrade. Upgrades allow the buyer to get a steeply discounted price on new release of an identical or closely related product. Creative Suite 2 Design Standard licensees can buy the upgrade to Creative Suite Design Premium 3 for instance. Upgrades are also available for individual applications. An Illustrator CS user can purchase an upgrade to Illustrator CS3.
The suites are a real bargain when compared to the price of the individual applications but as the old saying goes, you take the good with the bad. Adobe considers the suite one license which cannot legally be unbundled. That means you can’t put half the apps on one machine and half on another. It also means you can’t upgrade just one application. In short, it’s all or nothing at all for suite upgrades. Any attempt to upgrade a single application will fail with an error reporting that a qualifying product can’t be found.
Unfortunately the wording on Adobe’s website is less than clear on this (and the reason for this post), stating only that the eligibility for upgrading to InDesign CS3 is a license for InDesign 2, CS, or CS2 or Pagemaker 6 or later. There’s no explanation of the fact that someone using InDesign CS2 as part of the suite is NOT eligible. A similar problem with the same error message occurs when an attempt is made to upgrade an individual product to a suite by purchasing an upgrade license instead of the required upsell license.
To summarize. If you hold a license for an individual application, you can move to the entire suite through an upsell or just upgrade that single application. If you own a suite license, you can upgrade the suite but not the individual applications.
So, what’s a person to do if he/she has purchased the incorrect package? Fortunately Adobe has a 30 return policy but hopefully this post will provide an ounce of prevention so that pound of cure won’t be needed.
Finally, you may have noticed my use of the word license quite a bit here. Nobody owns any of these applications except Adobe. What you buy is simply the right to use that product within the guidelines put forth in the End User License Agreement.
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Many thanks for clearing this up. Given Adobe’s current policy that a suite doesn’t allow an application upgrade, it makes no sense for many of us to get a suite. Better to stick to the products we need and only upgrade them when necessary. That also lets us to use them on different machines.
If you get a chance, you might look into Adobe’s cross-platform licensing policies. From my limited experience, it seems to be something they do on-demand, with the only cost being hassle and delays. But as with upgrades, there may be some hidden gotchas Adobe doesn’t mention.
In my experience, within their rules Adobe is helpful and friendly. One inch outside their rules, however, they refuse to bend no matter what the circumstances and no matter what some Adobe rep has said.
I had an unpleasant experience where an Adobe customer service rep had told me something about an upgrade that, a few weeks later when the product came out, Adobe refused to honor. I asked to talk to the manager. When their Customer-Service-Manager-from-Hell found out that my earlier conversation wasn’t recorded (or so she said), she treated me like I was lying and yet made it clear that the service rep I talked with originally would be seriously disciplined. I ended up so ticked off by that bizarre double-standard, I’ve not upgraded that product since.
In Switzerland, an ?upsale? from Adobe Design Collection (ID2/AI10/PS7/AC6) to the CS3 Design Standard was about CHF 400 more expensive than upgrading each app individually. Since I didn?t understand why I should just give Adobe 400 Swiss Francs ($400) for plain nothing, my choice of the future upgrade path should be obvious?
Bob, technically, you could install half the Suite on one machine and half on another, because you can have two activations live at the same time (though you’re supposed to only use one at a time). But perhaps that’s just splitting hairs.
Mr. Hair splitter, er, I mean David,
You’re correct, and I really should have emphasized that you can’t split the suite for the purpose of having two workstations for two different people.
Lou,
The reason for your issue is that you didn’t have a suite, you had a collection. That was just a box set of a bunch of individual applications.
You could use any one of the for an upsell but not the entire collection.
When Adobe introduced the suite EVERYONE was faced with the decision of what to do and back then only Photoshop was eligible.
For you it may well pay to continue to upgrade individual products.
Well I had a CS2 suite. I only bought an InDesign upgrade last year. I had no problem installing and activating this stand-alone InDesign upgrade.
I did however got a license for the CS3 suite later from my instutue. This required an uninstall of the upgraded InDesign CS3 before it would install InDesign again as part of the suite (wich makes sense).
It makes no sense that you can not upgrade a single program as you say. My expierence out of first hand is that it is NO problem to do so…
If you had an earlier version of InDesign (CS or 2.0) installed in addition to the suite the installer would have seen that and recognized it as the eligible product.
Bob, thanks for the explanation. The status of this upgrade/upsale/upwhatever is actually clear to me. I just don?t get Adobe?s accounting: how can a bundle of four products be more expensive than the four products individually?! Are there people who are so bad with numbers so that they will buy such a pricey suite upsale anyway?? Paying a $400 premium only for the comfort (?) of having a single serial number? Or is it only a regional issue? It?s baffling.
In fact, at first I only upgraded ID2 to IDCS3. Upon reading that PS7 won?t be compatible with Leopard and/or Intel (don?t remember what the issue was) I decided to upgrade the rest as well since I will likely have to replace my ?tigered? PowerBook some time next year. And since I hardly use the other apps beyond the features of PS7/AI10, in the future I will likely upgrade only ID ? if at all. At least until the next Mac OS X incompatibility, that is? :D
It really depends on your situation. When the original suite was released you could buy it at upgrade pricing from Photoshop. If you already had Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat then you’re right…it cost more for the suite than all the products individually.
But going forward, the upgrade pricing on the suites is, at least from what I can see, less expensive than upgrading the individual apps. The CS3.3 Design Premium upgrade from CS2 is $599 and includes upgrades to InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks.
Upgrading those individually would cost about twice that much and if you don’t own one or two, that really inflates the price.
So you have a choice, which I think we can all agree is a good thing
>If you had an earlier version of InDesign (CS or 2.0) installed in addition to the suite the installer would have seen that and recognized it as the eligible product.
How smart is this updater I wonder…
I now have the CS3 suite installed as suite minus InDesign, I had InDesign installed as a stan-alone with a different serial. I cab only hope that the CS4 version will let me update only InDesign, and who knows later on maybe the suite…
I got the über suite at my university bookstore, and I never use most of the stuff in it. Next time, I’ll get single apps instead of everything.
Hey, Bob, it looks like the upsell savings is $400, not $200. $1,399 vs $1,799 on Adobe’s site.
Even better. Could be a price change from the time of the original post.
Thanks for the update!
Thanks Bob for this explaination.
I have Photoshop CS3 and I want to buy the Production Premium Suite CS4.On their website it says that I can upgrade from Photoshop CS3 to this suite – is this really possible? However when I order them online – or even on the phone with Adobe my order will be canceled some minutes later – without given any reason. Calling customer support can’t say why. I wonder whats going on here.
Also, there is no Upsell Option available on the Adobe Online Store – wonder why?
I am absolutly speechless that I can’t order and that I have a bad feeling if I buy the right version.
Also, why is the upgrade available for me from Photoshop CS3 when I use the Adobe Upgrade Manager : https://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/upgrade
I am completly unsure what to buy and how to buy.
Thanks for any hint on this
Andy
If you go to the Adobe Store online you should see a few upgrade choices…you want to upgrade “From any one product.”
If you still have problems you can buy from Amazon:
https://tinyurl.com/qwjqvg
The price right now is about $1050 which is about $50 less than Adobe’s price.
Thanks Bob, I choosed this option – however they don’t like my order and always cancel it.
Will try Amazon