8 Reasons Why Premiere Pro Is So Expensive

When Premiere Pro comes up in conversations either in-person or online, there’s one question that everyone seems to ask: “Why is Premiere Pro so expensive?” There are several reasons for this.

Premiere Pro is expensive because:

It’s usually marketed to businesses, not individuals.
It’s the best.
It’s the “Industry Standard.”
It comes with other apps.
It gives you access to free stock videos.
You get 100GB of cloud storage.
It integrates with other Adobe apps.
It’s packed with powerful features.

Let’s look at each of these reasons in a bit more detail.

Table of Contents

It’s Usually Marketed to Businesses, Not Individuals

Although Adobe, the creator of Premiere Pro, sells plans for individual users, the software, like most of Adobe’s products, is really meant for business use. That’s why it has so many features and so many included apps. (More on both of these later.)

If you’re an individual with a blog or a small, single-person advertising or graphic design business, you’re probably not going to need a lot of what Premiere Pro has to offer. It’s large-scale software, and Adobe expects businesses to purchase it more so than individual customers.

Furthermore, they don’t scale back drastically on their individual plans.

Check out the comparison plans for individuals and businesses. You’ll see that the main difference between the individual plan and the business plan is that the business plan comes with all the Creative Cloud apps, while the individual plan only comes with a few.

The Premiere Pro software, however, is precisely the same for both businesses and individuals.

You aren’t missing out on more advanced or professional features within the app as a single user. You’re getting business and industry-standard-quality software.

Since individual users are getting the same great features as businesses, Adobe charges those individuals a similarly steep price.

It’s the Best

Terms like “best” and “worst” are always subjective. However, many businesses, reviewers, and blogs list Premiere Pro at the top of their “Best” lists. When dozens of different people and corporations repeatedly call something “the best,” in most people’s eyes, it becomes the best.

Companies know they can charge more for “the best” product, so they do.

Plenty of sites, from PC Mag to What Say the Experts have Premiere Pro at the top of their lists. That makes it easy for Adobe to see they have a top-tier product, and top-tier products come with top-tier price tags.

For more information, check out which is better: PowerDirector versus Adobe Premiere Pro.

It’s the “Industry Standard”

Because it’s subjectively “the best,” Adobe Premiere Pro is also considered the “industry standard” software for photo and video editing. Plenty of unofficial sites, such as Reddit, TrustPilot, and Quora, list Premiere Pro as the industry standard, but more important sites and publications give it that designation, as well.

This article from Vogue Ballroom puts Premiere Pro at the top of their “What Do Professional Video Editors Use?” list. Training NYC shows numerous training classes for “learning the essentials of Adobe Premiere Pro, the industry-standard video and film editing software package used today.”

Products that receive more critical acclaim and frequent use by esteemed professionals in the field gain status, which translates into higher prices.

It Comes With Other Apps

So far, we’ve talked mainly about Premiere Pro’s popularity and esteem and how those things tie into higher prices. However, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. When it comes to Premiere Pro, you aren’t just buying a famous name.

When you purchase Premiere Pro, you’re getting access to top-of-the-line editing software, as well as a few of Adobe’s other excellent apps.

These include the following:

Premiere Rush
Adobe Fonts
Adobe Portfolio
Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark alone costs $9.99 per month, and it’s only a single component of what you’re getting with Premiere Pro.

You can’t expect to get all these apps for the cost of a single app. When you consider the individual prices of all the included apps, you’ll soon see that Premiere Pro could be even more expensive than it is.

It Gives You Access to Free Stock Videos

Although you don’t get unlimited access to Adobe Stock like you would if you purchased the Creative Cloud subscription, there are over 6,400 high-quality video clips you can use for free, and over 5,000 of those are in 4K. You can do a lot with that many free video clips, especially if you’re an individual user or small business owner.

You Get 100GB of Cloud Storage

Another excellent thing about purchasing an Adobe Premiere Pro subscription is that it comes with 100 gigabytes of free cloud storage. That is a lot of free storage space, even considering how large video files are.

With 100 gigs, you’ll be able to store a ton of footage before having to back things up and move them around to make extra room.

It Integrates With Other Adobe Apps

As I’ve already mentioned, Premiere Pro comes with a few other included apps.

However, as with all Adobe products, you have the option to purchase a Creative Cloud subscription with Premiere Pro, which gives you access to over 20 of Adobe’s best-selling apps, including:

Premiere Pro
Photoshop (and various other Photoshop-related apps)
Illustrator
XD
Acrobat DC
Illustrator and Illustrator Draw
Capture

Whether you purchase the entire Creative Cloud subscription or just Premiere Pro and one or two of these other apps, they all integrate seamlessly with one another.

It’s Packed With Powerful Features

Finally, Premiere Pro is expensive because of all the fantastic things you can do with it, even without the addition of the Creative Cloud subscription and other apps. It’s so much more than a simple video editing app, and all those exceptional features are what make it the best and, consequently, expensive.

I couldn’t possibly list everything you can do with Adobe Premiere Pro, and even if I could, it would take you hours to read it all.

So instead, I’ll just hit some of the highlights.

Editing, Captions, and Picture Quality

With Premiere Pro, you can maintain unlimited video tracks, utilize multi-cam editing, and use three-dimensional editing.

The software also supports 4K and 360° VR Content. As of the 2021 update, new caption tools allow you to add and format captions, with a planned upgrade for generating automatic captions in the future.

There are advanced audio editing tools, including a “copy and paste” type feature that allows you to take several layers of audio and move them to a new clip simultaneously. The software offers 47 preloaded scene transition options, and there’s a “warp stabilize” feature that helps you calm and steady a scene shot with a shaky hand or in bumpy conditions.

Auto Reframe

Another relatively new feature with Premiere Pro is “auto reframe,” which allows the user to change framing options from a square 1:1 viewing ratio to a vertical 4:5 or 9:16 or a horizontal 16:9 ratio.

There’s also an option for custom framing.

With the simple click of an option, you can make your video well-suited to social media, television, a movie theater screen, or any other screen you have in mind. Being able to do this cuts down on tedious and time-consuming editing processes.

Output Options

Getting your video ready to send out into the world is also simple with Premiere Pro. The app has a ton of different output formats from which you can choose, including:

480p
720p
1080p
4k

These output options help you optimize the video’s quality for different viewing destinations, including Bluray, DVD, various social media platforms, and more.

With the integration of Adobe Encoder, you have even more options.

Editing Software That Does It All

These few features and capabilities are only a handful of the numerous tools and options available to you when using Premiere Pro. Remember, it’s now considered “industry standard,” which means big-time Hollywood movie producers use it for their blockbuster films.

With that in mind, you know it has to be packed full of insanely awesome editing features. Otherwise, why would such big names (and bigger budgets) bother with it? If you’re looking for video editing software with all the latest bells and whistles, Premiere Pro likely has you covered.

If you’re ready to make the leap and give it a try, you can buy an Adobe Premiere Pro single-month or 12-month subscription directly from Amazon.

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