I Quit Adobe (For Good)

I cancelled Adobe–and found near perfect *cheaper* alternatives.

If you’re a designer, you use Adobe… Right?

I finally gathered the courage last week to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

A modern day horror story? LOL

I’d been thinking about it for a while, ever since Adobe didn’t offer me a discount subscription when I pretended to cancel in the autumn. I’d been employing that neat little trick since 2017, and it knocked off about $30/mo off my subscription: bringing it to $50 CAD (or less) vs $80 CAD. Until they no longer offered it.¹

As I stared down the $80 CAD/mo (before tax, so it was $88.57/mo) billing statement, I was determined to see if I could find a way to quit the suite. It simply was too much money on principle to rent a program indefinitely. I would pay Adobe just shy of $1,000 every year at this rate to own… nothing. Adobe used to be a software you could pay ~$400 for the suite and upgrade every few years when they came out with a new version. But it doesn’t take much number crunching to see how that’s way less profitable than the rental model.

This wasn’t the singular pain point I’d been having with Adobe: with the introduction of their AI tools over the last year I’d found my programs lagging and the interfaces getting more frustrating to use. I started complaining to my friends that it felt like Adobe was installing bloatware into their suite to chase AI and I rolled some of my application versions back to versions that didn’t slow my computer down to a snail’s pace, even with an M1 chip desktop.

Software as service is so normalized now that we aren’t really batting an eye at it: it’s just one more subscription service on top of Netflix, HBO, Spotify, etc. Much of that is normalized too under the rationale that you get updates and good features delivered ‘free’ to you. But what if you don’t like the features? Plus–I make like 70k a year, so what’s 1k expense as ‘the cost of doing business’. But that’s 1k is money I’m not able to save or put into investments, retirement, etc. What if there were options?

The Search

The easiest first candidate to explore was Figma. It offers some limited free features (3 projects/boards). I’d been poking around it a little under the recommendation from my friend

Gabrielle Merite

. And I decided to try using Figma for an entire branding project from start to finish instead of Illustrator and see if I ran into any issues.

Another bonus: it became so easy for me to get friends to look over my work and give feedback to me with Figma’s easy share/comment system.

It went incredibly well, better than expected. Turns out it’s not just for web design, although it handles that immaculately too. I’m using it as basically a full replacement for Illustrator.

The speed at which Figma flows and works puts even pre-bloatware Adobe to shame. I found myself flying through the branding project, easily able to set up templates, swatches, and everything even faster than in Illustrator. I loved the free plugin functions: especially the Unsplash one where I could iterate images quickly and easily from within the program instead of having to go to the website, download, load-in, and experiment. If I’m being honest, I was starting to dread working in Adobe because it felt slow and uncreative. Figma brought the fun back to brand design again for me because of it’s zippy speed and efficient UI. I felt I could iterate my ideas rapidly and be creative within the program in ways I couldn’t with Illustrator.

The first hurdle I ran into is that I use the vectorize feature in Illustrator a lot to experiment with fonts for logos, etc. Figma doesn’t have a feature like that built in–but there are free plugins that work honestly the same if not better than Adobe’s version. With that problem solved in moments, I pressed forward.

I was able to pop all my brand work into presentations easily in Figma, and it was a joy to be able to copy/paste/move elements over from my exploratory boards into the presentation within the same file, unlike in Adobe where I would usually put my presentations in InDesign and need to export my assets from Illustrator first. But this was where I ran into my second hurdle: mockups! Figma can’t really make those to the level I need.

This is where I turned to the Affinity Suite which is basically a true alternative to the Adobe Suite: it offers 3 programs, Affinity Photo (a Photoshop clone), Affinity Designer (an Illustrator clone), and Affinity Publisher (an InDesign clone). The suite has a 30-day free trial, so I downloaded them with hope. The three apps are a one-time purchase from Affinity for a fraction of the price of Adobe. And then I would own them, if all went well. They even deliver a suite of free feature updates to their programs until they begin to work on the next model.

Affinity Photo and Designer can open .psd / .ai/eps files respectively (and even save to them!). And Publisher can open IDML! So I experimented with using my normal PSD mockup files in Affinity Photo and working on client mockups that way. Much of the interface was familiar or small changes I could navigate without too much troubles². It worked great! I was able to make the mockups required for the presentation and easily pop them into Figma.

Without much troubles, I ran through the entire branding process in Figma, even creating the style guide (SO EASY WITH ALL MY WORKING FILES RIGHT THERE!), and exporting the logo marks, submarks, and variants I created inside Figma (exporting to EPS with a free plugin as native Figma export only does PDF/JPG/PNG/SVG). I felt like I never wanted to touch Illustrator again unless forced to.

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Ultimately, when it came to hit “Cancel Service” from Adobe it was really scary. I felt like I was cutting myself off from something essential, something fundamental to being a successful designer, and yet these are just the feelings a corporation with a monopoly instilled in me, not a true sense of reality.

I proved to myself that running different software can effectively replace my uses for Adobe, and if a situation comes up in the future, I can still pay for the individual Adobe apps or even the suite if needed. I am NOT locked out of the special insider club of Adobe because I cancelled before.

Adobe wants you to feel like there are no other options.

But there are; in fact some of them are even better than Adobe.

In fairness to exploring options, here’s a list of things I might run into problems in the future:

• I might miss Adobe Fonts (but this is what font demos are for / lots of free fonts exist!)

• I can’t open INDD files in Affinity Publisher. This sucks. But I don’t do much editorial design (I don’t like it) and don’t have many InDesign files anyway. UPDATE: publisher can open IDML files!

• I might have issues with complex dielines for packaging (but I can open all .EPS/AI files in Designer and I can save to PDF/EPS which is the print-ready standard).

• I have yet to experiment with an alternative to Lightroom, which is called RawTherapee. Funny name, but the interface looks near identical to Lightroom.

• I’m using the free version of Acrobat Reader which lets me make small edits/re-arrange pages, create fillable/signable forms for contracts, but not much else. That’s all I need it for! I can even use the compress PDF feature for free, just with Adobe’s online website for compressing PDFs.

• If I really need Illustrator or InDesign for some reason, I can rent a month of either for $30 CAD. That seems easy enough to me!

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Another important thing to note is that I quit just as Adobe launched new terms and agreements that means that everything you create inside it will be fed into their AI machine. No matter if it’s proprietary or NDA’d content or hell even our own personal projects or art. This is honestly WILD and really shitty. This isn’t why I dropped, but it’s important to note!

I’m not being sponsored for this, but in response to that new terms/agreements from Adobe, Affinity has put their entire suite on 50% off which means it’s roughly $100 CAD / $85 USD for the ENTIRE three apps - the end. lifetime. No additional fees. So if you’ve been curious about Affinity, try the trial, and if you like it, this is a great price! I bought it on 30% off and thought that was a steal haha!

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Ultimately, quitting Adobe may not be right for you: if you rely on synchronization across team members, heavy usage of Adobe Fonts, or other Creative Cloud specific features. But I wanted to raise the idea that as a freelance designer who isn’t reporting in or sending files to agencies/databases for others to use, it’s definitely possible to run your business without Adobe and save money.

Sometimes I feel like the design community is centered around consumption of digital assets: CRM programs/services, plugins, fonts, mockups all sold as ESSENTIAL. And I like to step back and assess whether or not I /need/ these things to run my business. On a similar note, I’ve cancelled Honeybook, Quickbooks, and more and cut my business expenses over half before even cutting Adobe out. Curious what I *actually* use to run my business? Let me know, I’ll write a different Substack on it – what I used to pay for and what I pay for now! (Spoiler, I think I’m set to run my business for around $1,000 a year I think, although I haven’t fully ran the maths post-adobe yet).

And with that, I move into the next phase of my business where I’m Adobe-free.

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Are you considering quitting Adobe? Have you already quit? Do you hate their AI updates as much as me? Did they slow down your computer too?

If you have any questions about my switch I didn’t answer here, let me know!

Thank you for reading!

1. Yes, I know I could probably have complained to support and gotten another year but it’s unclear if this can be done year after year. Also I’m socially neurotic and having to chat with a support person gives me anxiety.

2. Random note, for anyone who’s encouraged to try this, before you load in a mockup to Affinity Photo go to it’s settings and check the option that says “Import PSD smart objects where possible” first! This is crucial for them to work and is auto-off for some reason lol. But once it’s checked then everything works perfect.