I quit Adobe
Working in a creative industry requires some level of input back into your trade to give you the tools to be both productive and provide high-quality work. Think of it like an artist investing in some decent paint and canvas and stuff, or a darts player buying some proper good arrows and 10 pints of mid strength beer.
Since the dawn of time, or at least since the early 90’s Adobe has been just that - the high-quality tool you invest in to provide high-quality work.
I’d been a subscriber since 2015. Before that I had a **ahem** totally legit copy of Photoshop on an unmarked disk that I acquired from that dodgy bloke in the office who’s like a digital Dick Turpin.
When I went freelance though, I thought it best to invest at least in the single app subscription of Photoshop. Which soon became the full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription after the need for Illustrator and After Effects started to creep into my workflow.
Then I started a YouTube channel and with Premiere Pro and Audition being part of the CC suite it only seemed logical to use those apps too.
Hard drive all fattened up with gigabyte after gigabyte of Adobe data, I finally felt like I was getting value from my subscription, which as of writing is £56.98 a month if you commit to 12 months. Or £85.48 on a rolling month-to-month subscription 🤯
Things were going well. Then one day, after a particularly lengthy edit in Premiere I started getting random green flashes. The problem:
Adobe’s response:
So I was expected to extra steps to be able to edit in Premiere?
Needless to say I ditched it not long after and started using Final Cut Pro.
I found the quality of the voice-over recordings was slightly better in Final Cut too, so next to get sacked off was Adobe Audition.
I carried on with Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, for a few more years, but I eventually became reluctant to open any of them because they would literally throttle my Mac which, yes, was starting to show its age at this point.
If you saw the ‘How to attach objects to walls in After Effects‘ video that I put out, what you probably don’t realise is that it took about a week to record a, just short of three-minute video. It is just chopped-up bits of screen recordings that I managed to scrape together between software crashes and system hangs.
I’ve had similar experiences in the past too with Illustrator and Photoshop. I had a 5-minute task that brought about the need to jump between Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat. Honestly, it was one of the most frustrating few hours in front of a computer I’ve ever had.
The video was the final straw though. I looked at how much value I was actually getting from Adobe and as of January 2024, the answer was teetering around zero. £680 a year for something that you’re not really using is a massive outgoing.
Plus as impressive as it can be ‘sometimes’, I don’t like the rush to fill every bit of software with AI.
I’m not a fan of the subscription model either. And when I figured out that since I’d started my subscription, Adobe software had cost me around £5470 it brought a tear to my bank account.
So as my subscription came to an end I politely declined. Well, it was more like ‘F**k off! You’re not getting another penny out of me”.
I felt liberated but also a bit lost. As much as I was reluctant to open Illustrator, I did use it more than I thought.
Then there’s Adobe XD. I know it’s debatable, but I think XD is one of the best products Adobe makes. Clean, intuitive, easy to learn. I used it for wireframing, icons, designs, pdf’s …you name it.
A couple of days into this “experiment” and I was back on Adobe’s website hovering over the All Apps CC plan. Like an addict looking for a fix, it seemed that Adobe had me hooked, but somehow I managed to resist and instead started looking for legit alternatives.
As I mentioned I’ve already been using Final Cut for a few years and I did buy Affinity Photo for a very reasonable price a while back, but I’d never used it.
Luckily though, my leaving Adobe coincided with a deal that Affinity were running. All V2 apps (Photo, Designer & Publisher), a lifetime licence, which Affinity always does, for a one-off payment of £71.99. Even if it’s not on offer it’s £159.99. You’d spend that in 3 months on an Adobe subscription.
As it turns out it is the best 70-odd quid I’ve spent. I use Photo and Designer every single day.
The void left by XD was filled by Figma, which I’ll stubbornly admit is actually better than XD, and again much cheaper. I’m just glad that Adobe didn’t get to acquire Figma like nearly happened in 2023. Freeform is also a good app for getting ideas down.
Instead of After Effects, motion graphics and animations are now done with Apple Motion and Lottie Creator.
I also sprinkle in a bit of Canva and Blender.
If you’d asked me 12 months ago to give up my Adobe CC subscription I would have told you where to go, but this experiment has made me get off my bum and find decent alternatives that quite often run a lot better than Adobe, give you the same results and don’t break the bank.
I'll never go back. Now, I'm not saying you have to ditch Adobe completely. But do yourself a favour – stop giving them money for a minute and see what else is out there. I bet you have some pleasant surprises waiting. And if not, well, at least you had a break from the spinning beachball of death.
Quick update:
You haven’t heard much from me lately because I’ve literally been busy being a Webflow Developer. I also got lost in Primark, but that’s a story for another day.
So like every other developer my days are now spent in Slack and Asana and Notion and every other productivity app that charges the same amount, integrates with each other and does the exact same job.
Then when we’re all finished being productive I get do my shizzle in Webflow.
And do you know what? I’m loving it!
Main image by Emily Bernal on Unsplash