176 days after launching its Firefly generative AI models into beta, Adobe today announced that Firefly is now generally and commercially available in its Creative Cloud, Adobe Express and Adobe Experience Cloud. This means, for example, that Firefly features like generative fill and generative expand in Photoshop are now available without having to install the beta. In addition, the company is also launching Firefly as a standalone web app, giving what was previously more akin to a demo official status within the Adobe product portfolio.
What’s maybe even more important, though, is that Adobe also today announced how it plans to charge for Firefly going forward. The company is going to use what it calls ‘generative credits’ to measure how often users interact with these models. Basically, every time you click ‘generate’ to create a Firefly image, you’ll consume one credit (and the company retooled the Firefly web app, for example, so that it doesn’t automatically start generating images before you’ve made all of the tweaks you wanted to make).
Image Credits: Adobe
It’s a bit complicated, but the good news here is that everybody on existing paid Adobe plans will get access to quite a few of these generative credits. Here is the full list:
- Creative Cloud All Apps: 1,000
- Creative Cloud Single App (includes Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, AfterEffects,
Audition, Animate, Dreamweaver, Stock, Photography 1TB): 500 - Adobe Stock paid subscriptions: 500
- Adobe Express Premium: 250
- Adobe Firefly Premium: 100
- Creative Cloud for Enterprise All Apps: 1,000
- Creative Cloud Pro Plus All Apps: 3,000
- Free users with an Adobe ID; Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud: 25
Once you run out of those credits — at least on most of these plans — you won’t lose access to Firefly, but it will run significantly slower. The exception here is users who subscribe to Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express Premium, who will only get access to 2 generations per day until their count resets at the end of the month, though for them, Adobe will offer additional subscription packs. Adobe did not release any specific pricing for these plans yet, though.
Also, until November 1, Adobe users subscribed to Creative Cloud, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express and Adobe Stock won’t be subject to the credit limits yet.
“All of these models are very large. They run in the cloud and are expensive to run. And we are optimizing them for quality of output, not for inference speed,” Alexandru Costin, Adobe’s VP for Generative AI and Sensei, told me. “Because of that, we need to protect the user base to make sure they have access to the service and to ensure fair use of the service.”
Costin explained that the team had looked at a token-based system, but the feedback from early testers was that this was too hard to explain to customers.
Adobe says that its users have used Firefly to generate well over 2 billion images so far. Costin stressed that since the company mostly trained the models with images from its Adobe Stock collection, they are commercially safe for businesses to use. As the company recently announced, it will even indemnify its enterprise users against potential lawsuits when they use Firefly-generated images.
