Adobe Creative Cloud, a forthcoming service that will let you license Adobe’s highly sought-after Creative Suite and give you a plethora of cloud-based extras, now has a price tag: US$50/month with a required one-year contract.

Creative Cloud was introduced at the annual Adobe Max conference in October 2011, with a promised launch date in “early 2012”. The service promises access to the latest version of the Creative Suite software, Lightroom 4, Muse, Edge, touch applications and 20GB of cloud storage with syncing options. Until now, the company has kept silent about pricing and the full array of extras users would get with the service.

Though the $50/month fee might sound a little high, buying a full licence to the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite runs to between $1 300 and $2 600, depending on which programs you want.

One of the most persuasive arguments to buying a Creative Cloud subscription will be the ability to get the latest software updates before retail buyers get them. Ideally, the company wants every major user of its products signed up for a subscription so they never have to buy the big software bundle again.

The Creative Cloud subscription is a direct response to piracy of Adobe’s expensive products. Design professionals who can’t get their employers to pay for it or strapped students who need the software for projects sometimes steal Adobe’s software via torrent and file-sharing sites. But with Creative Cloud, Adobe hopes to get some of these would-be pirates to pay a more affordable monthly subscription.

The company will also offer volume licensing to businesses for $70 per user per month. This business option of Creative Cloud will offer added collaboration and security features that justify the extra expense.

Creative Cloud will launch alongside Creative Suite 6 before the second half of this year. — Sean Ludwig, VentureBeat