Previously, Adobe XD was priced at $10 for a month access on Apple’s MacOS and on Microsoft’s Windows. The free starter plan lets you get started with 2GB of space and a single active shared prototype and design spec, you’re also limited to using a limited font set, as opposed to the complete library available to those on paid plans. Still, the offer is nothing to sneeze at; offerings from rivals will set you back by a bit more “Sketch” costs almost $100 a year and is only available for Apple’s MacOS. Andrew Shorten the Senior Director, Product Management at Adobe mentioned in the recent global press conference that he believes “Adobe XD will be as big as Photoshop, if not bigger,” Adobe says that it has huge plans for new XD upgrades in the coming weeks, including advanced prototyping and animation capabilities, new team collaboration features, and plugin support. Some of these features also include:
Improvement to open Photoshop files quicker and preserves image effects. Easier to view multiple pages from Sketch files. Password protection for your latest design specs. Pasting to multiple artboards.
The new Starter plan provides strength to Adobe’s vision of giving everyone from beginner designers, emerging artists to enterprise brands everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences and explore the rapidly expanding field of UX design with absolutely no financial commitment. But at the same time it give Adobe a chance of growing to even bigger Scale by announcing Adobe XD for free they have opened there gates for all new designers and have calculated it as an opportunity, as conceivably, the free version of Adobe XD would serve as a gateway to other paid Adobe products and services like Photoshop and services like Typekit, a font-subscription resource that comes bundled with Adobe software. Also read: 10 Best Free and Open Source Software For Windows 10 “Free software is just the start”, said Belsky, Product and design lead at Adobe. Adobe also announced a $10 million fund for developers who want to create plug-ins and third-party tools to work with XD. Belsky says Adobe teams are also exploring novel teaching methodologies to keep designers up to speed with the often overwhelming cycles of software improvements. With that, Adobe is all set to attract a wider set of budding user interface and experience designers than its nearest competition, it’ll be interesting to see if this prompts those rivals to respond with more accessible offerings in the future, all in all we could expect a price cut from them as well and at the end of the day it will be users who would be at most benefit.
