The price of video editing software, 2015–2026

Since 2015, the price of editing software has moved in two directions. The editors you buy once held still or got cheaper: Final Cut Pro has cost the same $299.99 since 2011, and inflation has taken almost a third off it since 2015, and DaVinci Resolve Studio fell from $995 to $295. The subscriptions went the other way. Since 2018 Adobe has raised Premiere Pro twice and its all-apps plan four times, and several newer creator tools (transcript editors, AI clippers, phone editors) raised their entry prices by 25% to 71%.

Nobody publishes a price history for these tools, so we rebuilt one. We pulled every official pricing page we could find from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, quarter by quarter from January 2015 to October 2026, and read US App Store listings for the phone-first apps. We also read the price data Adobe's own pages load. That gave us 1,189 price observations across 15 tools, which we adjusted for US inflation. Every price below is a US list price in US dollars, before tax, and says how it's billed: one-time, monthly, annual prepaid, or Adobe's "annual, billed monthly" plan (ABM), which commits you for a year but charges you monthly.

Two directions since 2015#

US consumer prices rose 44.2% from January 2015 to September 2026, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI-U. So a price that stayed flat got cheaper, and one that rose by less than inflation fell in real terms. The chart below puts every plan we could follow on the same footing: its October 2026 price as a share of its first archived price, both in September 2026 dollars.

The split isn't simply one-time against subscription. Kapwing's annual Pro plan was $200 in March 2020 and has been $192 a year since October 2021, Canva's web Pro plan was $119.40 a year in 2019 and $120 in July 2025, and Submagic's Starter plan ended slightly below where it began. But the biggest real cuts were both one-time editors, and the biggest real rises were the AI-era creator tools. The events behind those moves are below.

The one-time editors got cheaper#

Final Cut Pro is the flattest line in the dataset. Apple's Mac editor was $299.99 on the Mac App Store at launch in 2011, $299.99 on apple.com in January 2015, and in October 2026 Apple's FAQ still said "Final Cut Pro is also available as a one-time purchase for $299.99." In September 2026 dollars the January 2015 price is $432.50, so today's buyer pays 31% less in real terms.

Blackmagic went further. DaVinci Resolve Studio, the paid version of Resolve, cost $995 one-time in October 2015. With Resolve 14 in April 2017, Blackmagic cut it to $299 and pitched it as "50% less than the cost of popular cloud subscriptions". It has been $295 since November 2020. That's 70% less in dollars and 79% less after inflation. On 27 October 2026 Blackmagic's page showed it on a 20% promotion at $236; the series below uses the $295 list price. The free version of Resolve stayed free the whole time.

Wondershare's Filmora is the one-time editor that rose. Its perpetual licence was charged at $59.99 in December 2017 and has been $79.99 since mid-2021: +33% in dollars, −2.4% after inflation. Ignore the crossed-out "regular" price next to it (US$129.99 in October 2026): it's an anchor, and a sale was running in nearly every capture. The licence has also narrowed. In October 2026 Filmora's checkout said the perpetual licence covers updates "within Filmora 16", one major version, and its annual plan went from $39.99 to $49.99 a year.

Adobe's subscription crept up#

Adobe stopped developing Creative Suite in 2013. Its May 2013 announcement said there would be no more Creative Suite releases and priced Creative Cloud at "US$49.99 per month based on annual membership". In January 2018, the earliest archived page with a readable price, Adobe's Premiere Pro page still offered all the apps at $49.99 and Premiere alone at $19.99 a month, both ABM.

Since then the single app has risen twice and the all-apps plan four times. Adobe's 2022 increase left single apps alone. Its November 2023 increase took Premiere from $20.99 to $22.99. In June 2025 all-apps members were moved to Creative Cloud Pro, which Adobe priced at $69.99 a month on the ABM plan in North America, up from $59.99. Adobe's own US price data showed Premiere at $22.99 ABM on 9 September 2026.

ABM is the cheapest way to pay Adobe monthly, and the plan the US government's case was about. Creative Cloud Pro month-to-month is $104.99 and annual prepaid is $779.99, CG Channel reported (we didn't capture those offers ourselves). In June 2024 the Justice Department, on a referral from the FTC, sued Adobe, alleging it buried the early-termination fee on ABM plans, which the FTC said is "50 percent of the remaining monthly payments" if you cancel in the first year.

The money shows why Adobe likes the model. Subscriptions were 18.0% of its Digital Media segment's revenue in fiscal 2013, the year it stopped new Creative Suite releases ($471.9 million of $2,625.9 million, per its 10-K), and 98.5% in fiscal 2025 ($17,389 million of $17,649 million, per its FY2025 10-K). The segment also includes Acrobat and Document Cloud, so this is Adobe's subscription shift, not video-editing revenue.

For a creator, the difference shows up over time. If you'd kept Premiere Pro on ABM from January 2016 to October 2026, 130 months at whatever the list price was, you'd have paid $2,770.70, or $3,360.47 in September 2026 dollars. That assumes $19.99 for 2016 and 2017, because the earliest archived Premiere page with a readable price is from January 2018. The all-apps plan over the same months came to $7,241.70. Final Cut Pro, bought in January 2016, cost $299.99.

Creator and AI tools rose fastest#

The tools built for creators, not editors, raised prices fastest, and several did it through renames. Descript's cheapest paid tier was Producer at $14 a month in October 2019 ($10 a month billed annually). It became Creator at $15 in August 2020, then in mid-2024 Descript renamed its tiers: the entry tier became Hobbyist at $19, and the "Creator" name moved up to a $35 plan. That looks like a jump from $15 to $35, but it's a rename. Like for like, the entry tier reached $24 a month by April 2025 and $16 billed annually by May 2025. That's +71% on monthly billing from 2019 to 2025, +31% after inflation, and most of the rise came in under a year, from mid-2024 to April 2025. In October 2026 Hobbyist included 10 media hours and 400 AI credits a month with 1080p export.

OpusClip, the AI clipping tool, raised its Starter plan from $9 a month in February 2024 to $15 by August 2024, monthly billing only. Its Pro plan has stayed at $29 a month, or $174 a year on annual billing. Not every AI tool went up. Submagic, which makes captioned clips, raised its Starter plan from $20 to $29 a month in November 2024 and cut it to $19 about two months later.

The phone editors moved too, though we can only see them through the US App Store, which lists an app's most popular in-app purchases rather than a full price sheet. On that list, Captions' Pro plan (now called Basic) went from $7.99 to $9.99 a month in 2022, and InShot's lifetime Pro went from $34.99 in 2022 to $49.99 in 2025. Two plans changed shape instead. Riverside dropped its cheapest paid plan in September 2025, so the lowest paid price went from $15 to $24 a month on annual billing. Canva's App Store listing added Pro at $18 a month and $143.99 a year in August 2026, next to the old $14.99 and $119.99 prices; we couldn't see whether its web price changed.

CapCut went from free to $19.99#

CapCut is the clearest case of a free editor becoming a paid one. In July 2022 its US App Store listing showed only cloud-storage purchases. By January 2023 it listed a monthly subscription at $7.99 (and a one-month Pro pass at $9.99). The monthly subscription was $9.99 by July 2024. Between 27 December 2024 and 4 January 2025, a "Pro Monthly Subscription" at $19.99 appeared, and the $9.99 plan became "Standard". Both were still listed on 27 October 2026, with a $89.99 yearly subscription.

CapCut issued no formal announcement of the change, Newsweek reported in February 2026. Citing a January article on CapCut's website, the pricing site Sonary and user posts, Newsweek said CapCut had restructured its plans, with Pro at $19.99 a month or $179.99 a year, up from around $77 a year. The $179.99 yearly price never showed in the App Store lists we read.

The money followed. Appfigures, an app-analytics firm, estimated CapCut's net App Store and Google Play revenue at $3.3 million in January 2023 and $8.8 million in August 2023. In a separate global estimate, it put CapCut's August 2025 net revenue at $93.5 million, up 78% since the start of that year, and said the app was on course for more than a billion dollars a year. Those are third-party estimates with different scopes, so we don't chart them together.

CapCut also showed what a single owner can do to your editor. On the evening of 18 January 2025, ByteDance pulled TikTok and CapCut from US app stores, a day after the Supreme Court upheld the US law behind the ban. The service came back for existing users within days, and the app returned to the stores in mid-February, Thurrott reported. Since January 2026, TikTok says its new US joint venture's safeguards also cover CapCut, with ByteDance keeping 19.9%. We covered the TikTok side in State of short-form video 2026.

Apple adds a subscription#

Apple sold Final Cut Pro for iPad only by subscription from the start, at $4.99 a month or $49 a year from May 2023, unchanged on the US App Store through October 2026. In January 2026 it extended the idea to the Mac: Apple Creator Studio bundles Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage for $12.99 a month or $129 a year, from 28 January, with $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year for students and teachers. The one-time versions stay on sale, Final Cut Pro at $299.99.

That makes the break-even easy to work out. At $129 a year, Creator Studio passes Final Cut Pro's one-time price after about 2.3 years; paid monthly at $12.99, with the 24th payment. Premiere Pro on ABM ($22.99) comes to $298.87 after 13 months and passes it with the 14th.

What a creator's stack costs#

Few creators pay for one tool. We priced three illustrative solo setups as of 1 July 2021 and 1 October 2026, on annual billing where offered: an editor, a design tool for thumbnails, a captions or transcript tool, and in 2026 optionally an AI clipping tool. Final Cut Pro is spread over three years ($100 a year). Canva's 2026 price is its last visible web price ($120 a year, July 2025).

The Adobe-centred stack rose 14% in dollars from 2021 to 2026, which is 8% less in real terms, because Premiere rose less than inflation and Canva held still, while Descript's annual rate went from $12 to $16 a month. Adding an AI clipping tool takes it to $761.88, 20% more than 2021 after inflation. The Mac one-time stack fell 8% in real terms. The mobile-first stack rose 86% in real terms, because CapCut and Captions started charging.

Looking forward instead, here is what three years of each plan cost at today's prices.

What this means if you make videos#

The data can't tell you which editor suits your work, but it shows what you'll pay.

1. If you'll edit on a Mac for more than two years, buy Final Cut Pro outright. At $299.99 one-time, it costs less than Creator Studio's $129 a year from the third year, and less than Premiere on ABM from month 14. Creator Studio makes sense if you'll use Logic Pro or Pixelmator Pro too, if you're a student ($29.99 a year), or if you're not sure you'll still be editing in two years.
2. Try the free tiers before you pay. Resolve's free version handles 8-bit footage up to 60 fps at Ultra HD, Blackmagic says, and Resolve Studio at $295 one-time costs about the same as three years of CapCut Standard on its yearly App Store plan.
3. On Adobe, pick the billing basis on purpose. ABM is the cheapest monthly price, but it's a one-year commitment, and cancelling early in the first year cost half the remaining payments, the FTC said. If you only edit video, the Premiere single app ($22.99 ABM) is a third of Creative Cloud Pro ($69.99 ABM).
4. Expect the creator tools to keep getting dearer. Entry tiers for Descript, OpusClip, CapCut and Captions rose 25–71% in dollars between 2019 and 2026. When you like a tool's current price, an annual plan locks it for a year.
5. Compare plans by what's in them, not by name. Descript's "Creator" went from $15 to $35 because the name moved to a bigger plan. Check the limits (Hobbyist's 10 media hours and 400 AI credits, OpusClip Free's clips that expire after three days) against how much you post.
6. Add up your stack once a year. In our 2026 setups an AI clipping tool added $174 a year (OpusClip Pro), more than the $100 a year Final Cut Pro works out to over three years. Cancel what you didn't use.
7. Keep your footage and projects where you can get them. CapCut went dark in the US for a few days in January 2025. Export finished videos and keep the raw clips locally, whatever editor you use.

If you're weighing a subscription against what your channel brings in, our free YouTube money calculator gives a rough estimate, and what Shorts pay has the creator-reported numbers. Disclosure: we make ReelsBot, a Mac app that turns raw talking-head clips into a cut, and we plan to sell it as a one-time purchase, so we have a stake in this question; every price above comes from the vendors' own pages, not from us.

Methodology#

The census. For each official pricing page, we listed the Wayback Machine's captures with HTTP 200 status and fetched the first capture of every calendar quarter, January 2015 to October 2026. Where a price moved between two quarters, we fetched the daily captures in between to narrow down when. Adobe's 2023–26 pages load their prices from a separate data file, so we read the archived US copies of that file (US, en_US, no promo code) for the Premiere Pro single app and the all-apps plan. That gave 1,189 observations across 15 tools: 1,159 from Wayback captures, 22 from live pages on 27 October 2026 and 8 from publisher pages or press. Of those, 83 are like-for-like "entry paid tier" entries derived from the tier rows, and 62 are crossed-out "regular" prices or promotions, recorded but not used as list prices. The researcher re-opened 18 random auto-extracted rows and found the price in each capture, and on 27 October we re-opened the pages behind every number this post leans on and found the exact price or sentence.

What counts as the price. List prices only: promotions (Resolve's $236 in October 2026, OpusClip's promo annual price in early 2024) are excluded, and for Filmora we use the price charged, not the crossed-out "regular" price. Renamed tiers are followed like for like, by position (cheapest paid tier), not by name. Adobe's Premiere Pro single-app series starts in January 2018, the earliest archived page with a readable price; the cumulative cost since January 2016 fills 2016–17 with that $19.99, and the all-apps plan with $49.99.

Phone apps. CapCut, Captions, InShot, Canva's app and Final Cut Pro for iPad are measured from the "In-App Purchases" list on their US App Store pages. That list shows an app's most popular purchases, mixing current and older prices, so it's a proxy for what a new US iPhone user is offered, not a price sheet. We left out VEED: we couldn't find an archived VEED price, and third-party figures contradict each other.

Inflation. Real prices use the BLS CPI-U (all items, US city average, not seasonally adjusted), with September 2026 = 336.940 as the base. BLS published no October 2025 index because of the federal government shutdown, so we used the average of September and November 2025 for that month.

Limits. Taxes, regional prices and how often sales run aren't covered. Plan limits (credits, media hours, export resolution) have changed alongside prices, and we haven't normalised for them. Adobe's month-to-month and prepaid prices are press figures, not our series. Adobe revenue figures are from its 10-K filings; CapCut revenue figures are Appfigures estimates. The creator stacks are illustrations of common setups, not survey data.

Open questions#

• What did VEED charge over this period? Its pricing page renders prices in the browser and nothing priced was archived.
• How have Adobe's month-to-month and annual prepaid prices for Premiere Pro moved, and what was Premiere's price on adobe.com before 2018?
• Did Canva's web price change after July 2025, as its new $18 a month App Store price suggests?
• What does CapCut charge in the US on desktop and the web, and is its Pro yearly price $179.99, as Newsweek reported?
• Will the court enter Adobe's settlement, and what will the $75 million in free services be?
• How many people pay for Creator Studio, Final Cut Pro or CapCut? None of the companies publishes a number.
• How much do creators actually spend on tools each year? We found no public survey with a disclosed sample that answers it.