If you're a student who relies on Adobe's creative apps to help with your design or art work, then now is a good to time to sign up to Creative Cloud. Right now, students are eligible for a massive 65% discount on the full software suite, which includes the likes of Photoshop and InDesign.
Sadly, Adobe has now halted its temporarily free Creative Cloud licenses, which it offered in March to students who were forced to study from home during the early days of the global pandemic. But this discount still represents a huge saving on the usual monthly or annual subscription fee for Creative Cloud.
If you go for monthly payments, it'll save you $33/£33.70/AU$55 per month compared to the standard price for an 'All Apps' subscription. And the savings are almost identical if you opt for a pre-paid annual plan, with the student discount slashing $360 /£400/AU$607.20 off the usual price of $599.98/£596.33/AU$871.07 for the whole year.
But what are the benefits of signing up to Creative Cloud and what's the best way of getting the discount? In this guide we'll answer both questions, as well as showing you what you get with Adobe's 'All Apps' subscription, so you can decide if it's the right thing for you.
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Why sign up to Adobe Creative Cloud?
As the name suggests, Creative Cloud is a collection of over 20 desktop and mobile apps that give you professional tools for design, photography, video and UX creation, among other things. Basically, if you want to create anything visual, for print or the web, Creative Cloud will likely have the tools to help you make it.
The cloud subscription aspect means that you don't own the software you're using, and if you cancel the payments you'll no longer have access to those apps. But the system has benefits too, with Adobe pushing out regular updates to the apps and also giving you 100GB of cloud storage for the likes of Adobe Spark, Adobe Fonts and Adobe Portfolio.
Creative Cloud apps are also very nicely integrated with each other, which means it's easy to switch between the many in the 'All Apps' subscription. Here's the full list of apps you get – not bad for $19.99/£16.24/AU$21.99 p/month with the 65% student discount:
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Adobe XD
- Lightroom
- Lightroom Classic
- Acrobat Pro
- Animate
- Dreamweaver
- Premiere Pro
- Premiere Rush
- After Effects
- Dimension
- Audition
- InCopy
- Media Encoder
- Character Animator
- Prelude
- Fuse
- Bridge
How do I qualify for Adobe Creative Cloud student discount?
Naturally, you need to be a current student to qualify for the 65% off Creative Cloud discount. According to Adobe's terms and conditions, you need to be at least 13 years old and enrolled in one of these three institutions:
- University or college: an accredited public or private university or college (including community, junior, or vocational college) that grants degrees requiring not less than the equivalent of two years of full-time study
- Primary or secondary school: an accredited public or private primary or secondary school providing full-time instruction
- Home school: as defined by state home schooling regulations
Fortunately, this is relatively easy to prove. Adobe says that "if you provide a school-issued email address during purchase you are instantly verified", and these include .edu or .k12 in the US, .ac.uk in the UK, or "other email domains sponsored by educational institutions".
If you don't have one of those email addresses, then you'll likely need to prove your eligibility after you've signed up to Creative Cloud with another document – these include a school ID card, report card or a tuition bill.
One other thing to bear in mind is that the 65% discount is only for the first year – after that, Adobe automatically renews your contract at $29.99/£25.28 p/month, which is still between 44%-50% off the usual price, if not quite as juicy as the first-year discount. If you want to try the full suite of apps before diving in, you can also sign up to a free 7-day trial.
How do I get the Adobe Creative Cloud student discount?
If you've got your student email address handy, you can sign up for the Creative Cloud student offer at the links below.
You can pay for the subscription monthly or in one lump sum, and the cost for each is pretty much identical over the course of a year. It's also possible to get the pre-paid annual student discount through Amazon, where it's fractionally cheaper, so we've included links to those deals too.
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