Aviary.com is a set of image editing tools created in Flash. Launched to the public yesterday and hailed as “the future of SaaS.”  I tried pulling up Phoenix, their Photoshop-like tool yesterday but was denied due to high traffic.

What’s interesting is the business model. Out of the gate Aviary is limited to using Phoenix (Photoshop), Peacock (filter editor) 50 times, Toucan (color manager) 50 times, and Raven (vector editor) not all all! The premium model is subscription based at $9.99 a month or $99 a year. For someone who is used to paying $1,400 to $2,500 for Adobe Creative Suite this price point is pretty easy to swallow.