Creative software has rarely been priced or bundled in the way that creatives actually work.
Production is feast or famine. You go flat out for six weeks, then things go quiet while you chase the next job. The software licences don’t care. They bill you every month, all year, whether you opened the app once or lived in it. You end up paying the most for your tools exactly when you’re using them least. Everyone in this industry knows the feeling, and most of us have just accepted it as the cost of doing the work.
We think that’s backwards. It’s the reason we spent more than a year working directly with Adobe on an unprecedented deal we’re now bringing to the masses.
What we built with Adobe
The full Adobe Creative Cloud suite is now available on Spark, pre-installed on ultra-high-performance Adobe Workstations in the cloud. Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, the whole toolset, ready the moment your machine spins up. No downloads, no installs, no licence juggling.
And here’s the part we’re proudest of: we got it priced well under anything that’s been offered before, including by Adobe directly. Nobody has put full Creative Cloud in front of creatives at this price. That took a year of work to make happen, and it’s a genuine first.
A machine that keeps up, too
Because these are Spark workstations, the hardware finally matches the software. Your full Adobe suite runs on cloud machines with as much GPU and CPU as the job needs. After Effects that used to crawl through a long-form 4K comp just… goes. And it’s all pay-as-you-go, so a monster machine for a heavy week of rendering costs you nothing the moment you shut it down.
Open it from a laptop, a Mac, or even an iPad, and you’re in full Creative Cloud as if a powerful desktop were right in front of you, wherever you happen to be.
The bigger idea
This is a first step toward something we care about a lot: true usage-based licensing, for everyone, on everything.
Creatives should pay for the tools they use, when they use them, the same way they already pay for everything else on Spark. We do exactly this on our render farm today, where render licences for Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke and SideFX Houdini are billed by usage instead of locked behind a full-year commitment. The Adobe pricing is the next crack in a model that’s needed changing for a long time, and we’re going to keep chipping away at it… application by application, partner by partner… until paying for creative software finally works the way the work does.
That’s the fight. Spark is on the side of the people actually making things.
One more thing
To make it easy to try, we’ve put together a promo with Adobe: for a limited time, a free month of Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps on any new or existing Adobe ID when you sign up and take Spark for a spin. No gimmicks, no strings.
Take Spark for a free spin and see what Creative Cloud feels like when the pricing, and the machine underneath it, finally make sense.
