We spent £20,000 a year on Adobe. This year we are not renewing.
Oliver Lowrie
Ackroyd Lowrie spent more than £20,000 a year on Adobe licences. This year the practice is not renewing. The production layer of architecture has already moved to AI tools, and the incumbents know it.
We spend more than £20,000 a year on Adobe software. Well, we did last year. This year there is no way we will renew.
That is not a negotiating position. It is what happens when a subscription outlives its usefulness. Everything we used Photoshop and InDesign for can now be done in Claude and Gemini. The image tweaks, the document layouts, the diagrams. The lot.
People talk about token costs as if AI tools are just another line on the software budget. That misses the point. You have to look at the efficiency savings at the same time. When the new tool does the work of the old tool, and removes hours of production time on top, the £20,000 question answers itself.
If you think we are an outlier, look at what the market thinks. Compare the valuations of Adobe and the AI labs and it is clear we are not alone in doing this maths.
The incumbents can read the same charts. The slightly crazy news that Archicad can now use Forma, an Autodesk product, tells you everything. Rivals do not plug into each other's platforms when the moat is full. They do it when they can see it draining, and they have decided to fight off the challengers together.
None of this means design software disappears tomorrow. Our models still live where they always have. But the production layer around them, the layouts and images and documents that used to soak up licence fees and staff hours, has already gone for us.
So that is us. I suspect we will not be the last.