In October of 2021 I decided to bite the bullet and buy into the Adobe "creative cloud" scheme. If you are new to all of this, both lightroom and photoshop are no longer available in the "normal" way (i.e. pay a one time fee and get a copy to run on your machine). Rather Adobe has gone with a subscription model. You pay a monthly fee and get access to the latest versions and updates as long as you keep paying the fee. The fee for the photography plan is currently $10 per month and gives you access to both lightroom and photoshop.
There are pros and cons with all of this. The big pro is that for the subscription fee you get access to the latest versions. The con is that if you stop paying, you don't have some old version to run forever. A worry is that while the $10 per month fee (as of 10/2021) is entirely reasonable, there is nothing stopping Adobe for raising the rates at any time.
After 8 years I figure that on one hand I have gotten my money's worth out of my Lightroom 5 purchase, and in addition enough new features have been added to Lightroom to make it worth paying for.
This was easy to do. I logged into my account at Adobe. It told me I was already on the "free" CC plan (some kind of trial that I have never used) and gave me a button to "upgrade".
I set up Paypal to handle the monthly payments (which was an up front choice and easy). My thinking is that this centralizes the location of my credit card info and has fallbacks in case odd things happen with my credit card. We shall see. Adobe tells me that I am obligated to stick with the CC for the first year, but after that I can suspend or reenroll or some such. This is of little concern to me at this point since I simply intend to use it for the foreseeable future and indefinitely. But it is good to know the terms and details (which in truth I really don't in detail).
Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org