Premium subscription cancelled: Adobe Fresco digital painting app for iPhone, iPad and Windows now completely free
Adobe is scrapping the Fresco Premium subscription, for which Adobe previously charged $9.99 per month in a bundle with the mobile version of Photoshop. From now on, users can import brushes without a subscription, access the brush and color library in their own Adobe Creative Cloud account, and use thousands of additional brushes.
These brushes are intended to enable, among other things, a convincing recreation of watercolors or pencils. The premium fonts from Adobe Fonts are now also available free of charge. Fresco was already available free of charge without these features. This price reduction is likely intended to better position Fresco against Procreate, one of the most popular drawing apps for the Apple iPad, which only requires a one-time cost of $12.99. More details about Adobe Fresco can be found on the official product page.
Whether offering Fresco for free will be enough is questionable, as Procreate is not only a popular option due to its functionality, but also because the developers have spoken out against AI-generated content and subscriptions. Adobe, on the other hand, asserts that it does not use its own customers' art for machine learning and for training AI models, but the company is increasingly adding AI functions to software such as Photoshop, the training databases of which are not communicated transparently, further increasing the distrust of creative professionals in the company.
