Team and Multi-Seat Licensing
Lots of studios and agencies ask the same thing: “Can we buy Sidekick for the whole team on one annual license?” Here’s the honest answer, including the part that’s out of our hands.
The short version
Today, Sidekick is sold as a single per-person monthly subscription — $9.95/month, with a 30-day free trial — through Adobe Exchange. There is currently no annual plan and no multi-seat or volume license. Everyone who uses Sidekick subscribes individually.
Why there’s no team or annual option (yet)
This isn’t a choice we’ve made — it’s a limit of how Adobe sells third-party plugins.
Adobe Exchange handles the checkout and billing for every paid plugin, and the only model it currently offers us is a monthly subscription tied to an individual Adobe ID. Annual terms, “buy 10 seats,” and centralized company billing simply aren’t options Adobe exposes to plugin makers like us. So even though we’d love to offer them, we can’t — the marketplace doesn’t support it.
We could build a completely separate, self-managed version with our own licensing — but it would have to replace the Adobe Exchange version, not sit alongside it. Running two different ways to buy and install Sidekick would create far more confusion than it’s worth for the vast majority of users. We don’t think that trade-off is right, so we’re not doing it.
What we are doing: we hear the demand for annual and team licensing, and we’re exploring it with Adobe to see whether the marketplace can support those options in the future.
How to set up Sidekick for a team today
Until that changes, here’s the practical way to roll Sidekick out to several people:
- Each person subscribes individually under their own Adobe ID, from Adobe Exchange.
- Each subscription is billed separately (through FastSpring, Adobe’s payment partner) to whatever payment method that person uses at checkout.
- There’s currently no single invoice or shared “team account” that covers multiple seats — each seat is its own subscription.
Many teams simply have each designer subscribe and expense it, since it’s a small monthly amount per person.
Tell us what you need
If you’re a studio, agency, or in-house team that would want an annual or multi-seat plan, we’d genuinely like to hear from you at [email protected] — let us know roughly how many seats you’re thinking about. It helps us make the case to Adobe for proper team licensing, and we’ll keep you posted if and when it becomes available.