Adobe's freemium users grew 70% to 100 million — and design is reorganizing around them

Adobe has grown its "Creative freemium" base — free users of Firefly and Adobe Express — by 70% this year to 100 million monthly active users, while its professional business grew 15% year over year as of Q3. The figures, disclosed in the company's Q3 earnings transcript, frame the strategy that outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen described on a June earnings call: "We believe now is the time to aggressively acquire the next generation of Adobe loyalists."

At the Adobe Max conference, Fast Company interviewed Eric Snowden, Adobe's VP of design, about what a 100-million-user on-ramp means for the people who design the tools themselves.

Why the on-ramp matters now

Snowden traces the strategy back decades, to products like Elements, but argues that mobile and now AI let Adobe reach audiences it could never serve before. His own history supplies the data point. "People pick their first creative tools when they're really young, and we have a lot of data around that," he said. As a teenager he made posters and websites for his band — work that eventually led to his role at Adobe, a career he did not know existed at the time.

How do agents change flagship tools?

Snowden compares his teenage Photoshop use to "taking a 747 to go to the grocery store" — overkill for a band poster. The answer today works on two fronts. New, specialized tools like Adobe Fresco on the iPad target single use cases. Inside flagship products, AI agents act as a guide. Testing the After Effects agent, he likened it to a self-driving car: you can prompt your way in, but the layers, keyframes and easings remain underneath, and "at any moment you can drive the wheel and you have full control."

Structural redesign plays a part too. The properties panel in Illustrator consolidated many separate panels into one without removing anything — a single access point that simplifies a first encounter while leaving power-user workflows untouched. That balance is the hard tension: professionals treat these tools like musical instruments, and moving a key breaks their playing.

What happens when Photoshop splits in two?

Adobe recently launched an AI-assisted mode in Photoshop: a simplified, prompt-driven workspace where newcomers can edit an image without learning the full interface. The complete interface sits one click away, and movement works in both directions — users graduate up, or drop down. Snowden taught Photoshop at Parsons School of Design and learned that the goal is to get a student a result they are proud of as fast as possible; once they have that, they will invest time in learning the tool's depth.

What does ChatGPT access change?

Adobe's integration lets users @ Adobe inside ChatGPT and use natural language to pull on Creative Cloud capabilities. Snowden's team designs for continuity — "skills transfer" — so a skill built in ChatGPT remains an investment when a user opens a flagship app, and vice versa. He also acknowledges the structural constraint: some users will stay in ChatGPT entirely, and Adobe does not control the full end-to-end experience. "We're a workflow company," he said. People come to accomplish a goal across several tools, so everything has to work together.

How does freemium convert?

Freemium lets Adobe show capability before asking for an email or payment — "show versus tell," in Snowden's words. Conversion becomes a design question of timing: ask too early and the user has not received enough value; ask too late and the business suffers. The best conversion numbers sit at the balance point of that exchange.

The model carries risk, as Canva's roughly 22% workforce layoff and restructuring last week demonstrated — pressure partly attributed to serving a large free base using compute-intensive features. Snowden declined the comparison: Canva "does one thing," while Adobe runs multiple interconnected lines of business.

Who are these users?

A summer Adobe survey found the average small business owner fills five roles a day, adding 200 extra hours a year: 44% act as their own marketer, 41% as social media manager, 35% as creative director. Snowden sees demand for content at an all-time high across channels and rising, with AI as part of the solution — not only for productivity, but for raising the ceiling on the breadth and quality of work.

He extends that argument to his own profession. Designers once had to convince an engineer or a product manager to build an idea; now they can build it themselves, and a good portion of the software running on his own machine he wrote himself. Projecting six months forward, he expects what designers can build to keep accelerating — a moment he compares to the Flash days of the internet, when anything felt possible.