Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Program subscription for $9.99/month is a great deal in my opinion, based on what you get:

• Always up-to-date versions of Lightroom and Photoshop (no need to pay more to upgrade to Lightroom’s next major upgrade when it comes out!)
• Syncing to Lightroom mobile for the iPad and iPhone (and Android sometime this year)
• 2 GB of cloud storage
• A Behance.net pro account

However, potential subscribers and users of Lightroom have had a major concern – if you stopped paying, you could lose access not only to Lightroom, but also to your Lightroom catalog – which contains all the work you have ever done on your photos. Well, no more! Starting with Lightroom 5.5, if your subscription expires and you choose not to renew, you can still use Lightroom – forever. The catch is that you will be locked out of the Develop and Map modules, and you won’t be able to sync to your mobile devices.  While you therefore won’t be able to do additional photo editing other than Quick Develop work, you can continue to organize and manage your photos (even import new photos), and create any kind of output from Lightroom (export copies of your photos, print; and make books, slideshows and web galleries.)

Update/Clarification: You will not lose the Develop work you have done prior to your subscription expiring. If it does expire you will be locked out of doing additional Develop work, but you can create output that has your edits, you can reset your photo to undo your edits, you can refine them with the Quick Develop panel, and you can save them to XMP so that they are available in other programs that read this information (such as Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw.)

This is also the case if you get a free 30-day trial of Lightroom!

Adobe clearly has confidence that their Creative Cloud offering and Lightroom’s Develop editing tools are compelling enough that you will continue to subscribe.

Note that if instead of a subscription you have or purchase the perpetual-license stand-alone version rather than the Creative Cloud subscription you will continue to have access to all modules in the Lightroom version you purchased. Adobe has stated that they will continue to offer these perpetual-license stand-alone versions “indefinitely”.