Quick Links
I have used Adobe’s software for nearly seven years for creative tasks, especially video and photo editing. I’ve been lucky enough to get it for free for most of that time through university connections and employers providing it, but here’s why I’m considering jumping ship and picking alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud.
The Subscription Is Prohibitively Expensive
Adobe’s pricing model is prohibitively expensive. Adobe’s flagship, all-inclusive Creative Cloud plan costs $89.99 per month ($1079.88/year) if you pay monthly, $59.99 per month ($719.88/year) if you sign a year-long contract, or an up-front annual payment of $659.88 per year ($54.99/month).
For a profitable freelancer or creator, this may not be a huge expense. Conversely, for aspiring creators who aren’t earning money from their work yet or not earning enough to offset the expense, this is prohibitively expensive.
Adobe does offer some individual software and smaller bundles at reduced costs, but many creators, especially those in video, cannot suffice with just Premiere Pro, or just Photoshop and Lightroom. I only use four Adobe software with any regularity, yet I have to pay the price to use the entire suite.
Adobe has positioned itself as the industry standard for creative professionals, making it the most likely option to be selected by these aspiring artists and students, and also gives Adobe the leverage to charge these exorbitant prices. In many cases, Adobe isonly worth it for pros.
While Adobe does offer student discounts—at a whopping 66% off—these often also face scrutiny due to Adobe’s predatory pricing model.
Adobe Employs Predatory Pricing Practices
I mentioned that Adobe Creative Cloud is $59.99 per month if you sign a year-long contract. While Adobe has become more forthcoming about early cancelation fees, most consumers are unlikely to read the exact details of what they mean. I say this as someone who wanted to cancel early, and then chose not to because of the surprise fee.
ReadingAdobe’s cancelation terms, if you cancel your $59.99 per month Adobe Creative Cloud plan after 14 days or before your final monthly payment of that contract, you will be charged 50% of the remainder of that contract’s annualized price.
Let’s do the math. An annualized plan comes out to a bit under $720 per year. If you use it for three months, decide it’s too expensive, and want to cancel, that cancelation fee will be $720 minus three months of $59.99, then divided in half. Rounded, that’s about $280 to cancel your Adobe subscription after three months of usage: a cancelation fee of around $100 more than what you paid to use the service.
I would have no qualms about the pricing model if Adobe were more clear about its implications. However, the company instead ends up tricking most users into thinking they are paying a better monthly price, when it is a monthly price with expensive strings attached.
Many creative people with limited funds likely purchase the “less expensive” monthly option, end up wanting to cancel it because it’s too costly, and then find out they have a huge cancelation fee—I have been one of these people. It’s predatory, plain and simple, and theU.S. Department of Justice and FTC are even suing Adobeover this pricing scheme.
The ToS Give Adobe Too Much Ownership of Your Content
Adobe faced recent controversy about a terms of service update, where the company may “view, access, or listen to your Content through both automated and manual methods to improve our Services and Software and the user experience.”
The company did clarify its statements and revise some of its wording in the ToS, stating that user content would not be used to train Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI tool. However, in other areas, it already has done so.
Adobe Stock is a service where photographers can upload high-quality stock images and get paid when people use them. However, Adobe states thatit used Adobe Stock images to train Firefly.
While many of these photographers and artists were compensated for providing these images to train Firefly and may have known how their works would be used, unless they carefully read Adobe’s terms of service frequently and in-depth, they likely had no idea their own work was used to potentially make them obsolete.
AI features can add numerous layers of efficiency to creative workflows, but many folks in creative fields may not want their content to unknowingly be used to continue making them obsolete, especially considering Adobe’s somewhat ambiguous ToS over content rights. As such, many may end up preferring to use software that provides better protection from AI.
Adobe Is Losing Its Status as Industry Leader
For many creative tasks, Adobe is and has been the leading software solution. Very few alternatives have full feature parity with their Adobe counterparts. However, as creative tasks have dispersed to more and more job roles, far moreuser-friendly alternatives to Adobehave arisen, such asCanvagiving non-designers powerful and easy design tools, andSnapseed for free mobile photo editing.
Moreover, numerous alternative tools to Adobe’s software have surpassed it in certain tasks, such asDaVinci Resolveoffering many superior features to Premiere Pro, especially when it comes to color grading and correction. DaVinci Resolve additionally offers a completely free version of its software, albeit with reduced features, which can also act as a free trial before dropping $295 on the full release.
Similarly, multiplebrowser-based alternatives to Illustrator are free, andAffinityprovides many of the same features as Photoshop, Lightroom, and InDesign with similar user-friendliness but for a single purchase, rather than an exorbitant monthly payment.
Affinity, which was recently acquired by Canva,even offers a six-month free trial to new users who want time to learn the software before financially committing to it. And ever since Adobe’s ToS controversy has come to light, it has offered 50% off its base price for the software until August 15th, 2024, a single-purchase lifetime license.
In my case, as a video creator who often edits photos and graphics, I could purchase Affinity for $82.99 (on sale) and DaVinci Resolve for $295 to replace Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro for my work. For these two one-time purchases, I would be spending $377.99 once for all the software I need to create content, whereas one year of Adobe without any discounts would be $659.88 at the absolute cheapest.
On top of that, many creators can absolutely get by with completelyfree alternatives to Adobe.
Great Software Doesn’t Outweigh Poor Ethics
I write this article as someone who has used Adobe for many years. I do think the company’s software is generally fantastic, and in many cases, it is the best solution for many creative tasks. However, with exorbitantly high fees, a predatory pricing model, ambiguous ToS, and a growing base of alternatives, I probably won’t renew my subscription next time. I’m willing to sacrifice some features and convenient workflows between software, but cannot ethically support Adobe until it improves its pricing model and privacy.
