Credit: Apple

Apple’s professional creative apps have been slower to jump on the subscription bandwagon than those from Adobe or some of its other competitors, but the company is taking a step in that direction today. Starting on January 28, Apple will offer an Apple Creator Studio subscription for $13 a month, or $130 a year. Subscribers will get access to the Mac and (where applicable) iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, as well as “intelligent features and premium content” for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone versions of Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform.

Apple says it will also offer a one-month free trial for the subscription and a discounted version for students at $3 a month, or $30 a year.

Most of the apps also seem to be getting small feature updates to go along with the Creator Studio announcement. Final Cut will get a new Transcript Search feature that will allow you to dig through video footage by searching for specific dialogue, and a new Montage Maker feature “will analyze and edit together a dynamic video based on the best visual moments within the footage.” An updated Logic Pro “helps creators deliver original music for their video content” and adds a synth player to the app’s lineup of “AI Session Players.”

The biggest update is probably a new version of Pixelmator Pro for the iPad, designed around the Apple Pencil accessory. When Apple announced it was acquiring Pixelmator in late 2024, the image and vector editing app was only available for the Mac.

As for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers—in another lifetime, the apps formerly known as “iWork"—the core apps remain free, but the Creator Studio subscription adds “premium templates and themes” for the apps, as well as access to a Content Hub that provides “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations” for the apps. Apple is also offering a handful of OpenAI-powered generative features, including upscaling and transformation for existing images, the ability to generate images from text, and a Keynote feature that will create a slide deck from a text outline.

Standalone Mac apps are still available

The apps that you can access with (or can be improved by) an Apple Creator Studio subscription. The base versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Freeform will remain free.
Credit: Apple

Unlike Adobe, Apple doesn’t offer lower-end subscription tiers that only give you access to individual apps. The Creator Studio package is the best value for creators who use more than one of these apps and who split their time between the Mac and iPhone/iPad versions. Anyone else will inevitably be paying for at least a handful of things you don’t use.

Apple’s subscription prices look reasonable based on what you would pay for an all-access subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps, though Adobe’s apps also cover web design, photo editing, and some other use cases that Apple’s subscription doesn’t—$780 a year, $105 a month, or $70 a month if you pay for one year’s subscription a month at a time. Apple also allows up to six people to share a single Creator Studio subscription via Family Sharing.

The good news for people who only want one or two apps (or who have already bought the apps, or who simply don’t want yet another subscription) is that the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage remain available as standalone App Store purchases. Often, when apps shift to a subscription model, it means the standalone perpetually licensed versions go away—Adobe hasn’t offered standalone versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, or its other apps since 2013.

The iPad versions of the apps, including Pixelmator Pro, appear to be subscription-only. Each of the apps has slightly different system requirements, all outlined in a long list of footnotes at the bottom of Apple’s announcement.