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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping this would be about how annoying the pricing is for Creative Cloud. If I was a designer then I could justify paying that kind of monthly tariff, but as primarily a developer who needs infrequent access to Photoshop or Illustrator the pricing options are just highway robbery. At least in the old days I could pay up front and stretch it out over time to get my money's worth by deciding when and if to upgrade. Adobe is really pushing me as hard as they can towards the competition, and I've been using Photoshop for over 20 years now, so it's no light decision to give up such a familiar UI.

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I had this problem.

Pixelmator and Acorn for Mac are not perfect replacements but after awhile you figure out what they do well and you start to not miss Adobe products.

also iDraw... all of them together are trivial in cost compared to anything Adobe.

As a developer, I have to be able to open our designer's PSDs to extract elements. He's always using the latest features as well so I have to keep up with the new versions...

There are no alternatives that have even half-way decent PSD support (through no fault of their own, of course).

I completely agree. Each month I spend maybe an hour in Adobe apps, so even the student pricing (~$16/mo) which I'm eligible for, is too high for me to justify paying for Creative Cloud.

The Adobe hater I am ... 16 bucks a month for EVERYTHING THEY SELL is a fucking steal. You should be using it more, not less.

It's not everything they sell though.

25 bucks a month for students is not that bad. And 50 month is totally reasonable. I find it much more accessible than before. And honestly I think that's less than the money the average person here spends monthly at coffee-shops. Or in one night out!

Here's how you can afford it: avoid eating 5 sandwiches in a posh bar per month, and cook sometimes by yourself.

My IT budget for the year is about $500. Doesn't fit.

But for what i remember, neither illustrator or photoshop cs5 alone did fit in that.

EDIT: http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id-contentfilt... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362428,00.asp

but you could buy software once and use it for several years, skipping a few versions before upgrade. There are lots of users that don't need latest bells and whistles.

This. I used Fireworks MX (released 2002) until 2 years ago

Yeaaah, I am not the only one. It was the good old time! Each new version after the MX was a deception, damn Adobe.

You switch to what?

Inkscape and gimp.

I agree. Inkscape and Gimp do everything I need them to do. The last time I hit a limitation was when I needed Inkscape to create a multi-page document. But that was more than a year ago and I managed without that function.

I think the only irritation I get is gimp startup time on windows.

Need a replacement for Adobe Lightroom and I'm sorted then :)

Yes I spend more than that on coffee, I drink very good coffee every day and I enjoy it. If I used Photoshop every day I would also find their pricing reasonable, but the reality is I can go 6 months without needing Photoshop. I don't need advice on how to afford it, I am not a student and I have plenty of money. My point is that the old pricing model was at least justifiable for me whereas the new pricing model is just not suitable for me in any way. To capitulate to this greedy new regime would be a slap in the face for upstarts like Pixelmator who are doing a great product at a reasonable value, it's no Photoshop, but at least they aren't just trying to juice the orange of all the people that are extrinsically locked into their file formats.

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