A lot of Adobe Creative Cloud users have noticed their wallet getting thinner. For example, the Photography plan was the cheapest CC subscription option, offering Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC, and 20GB of cloud storage for $10. Now, the new plan offers the same three apps plus 1TB of cloud storage, but double the price.

Earlier this year, Adobe raised its prices

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“Since launching Creative Cloud more than five years ago, we have not changed prices for customers in North America (United States, Canada, and Mexico),” the company wrote announcing the news. “As Creative Cloud continues to evolve and improve, we will raise prices for the first time beginning on April 16, 2018. For our All Apps plan customers, we recently released five all-new Creative Cloud apps — Adobe XD CC, Dimension CC, Character Animator CC, Photoshop Lightroom CC, and Spark with premium features. Single App customers also benefited from the addition of Spark with premium features and Adobe Portfolio in their plans.”

Pissed with the new pricing policy, Twitter users started sharing free alternatives to the major CC Programs.

The price bump came as a surprise to many users, so they started sharing free alternatives to the CC programs

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One Twitter user, Kaeden “ghost malone” Stears, even put together an extensive list of free alternatives to all the major CC programs. “I made a blog post purely out of spite,” they said. “I actually made a whole blog out of spite, just to make that one blog post. I did it because I was furious about a spike in the price of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, which is already stupidly expensive.”

“I hate any company that tries to exploit the already poor-as-shit creator community, as I myself am a member of that group. However, I have a particular case of the ass against Adobe. Adobe, to me, symbolizes everything I hate about both capitalism and Western civilization’s complete disregard of the arts and humanities as not just valuable, but necessary parts of life.”

But the writer said they don’t want to preach or complain. “Instead, I’m taking a more proactive approach to my frustration. Instead, I’ve scoured the internet and rounded up free or cheap alternatives to every major Adobe CC product, many of which I personally use because I … hate Adobe so goddamn much.”

IF YOU DRAW OR DESIGN

Instead of Photoshop, try Gimp

Instead of  Lightroom, try paint.net

Instead of  Illustrator, try Inkscape

Instead of InDesign, try Canva or Scribus

IF YOU MAKE PICTURES MOVE

Instead of Premiere, try Davinci Resolve

Instead of Animate/Flash, try Opentoonz or Blender

Instead of After Effects, try Wax, Blender, or Fusion

IF YOU BUILD WEBSITES OR SOFTWARE

Instead of Dreamweaver, Spark, or XD alternatives: WIX, Weebly or wordpress.com, or wordpress.org

IF YOU DO STUFF THAT REQUIRES THESE OTHER PROGRAMS

Instead of Audition, try Audacity

Instead of Acrobat Pro, try Foxit Reader or PDF Escape

Instead of INCOPY, try LOVING YOURSELF AND USING LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE (WHO USES THIS???)

IF YOU NEED STOCK PHOTOS OR FONTS

Instead of Adobe Stock, try Pexels, Unsplash, or Pixabay

Instead of Adobe Fonts, try Google Fonts or Dafont

BONUS: If you need Free music or sound effects, try YouTube Audio Library,  Soundbible

Soon, people started sharing their take on the situation, debating if subscription software is really worth the money

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“I have used Adobe products in the past, mostly InDesign, Premiere, and Photoshop,”  Kaeden told Bored Panda. “While I can’t deny that they’re powerful programs with a lot of great features, I personally find them to be a bit clunky. The learning curve is also massive, which I find frustrating.”

Given how powerful the programs are, Kaeden doesn’t think a high price tag is unreasonable. “What really grinds my gears is the subscription. Clip Studio Paint’s full feature version is $220 USD and you only have to pay for it once. I much prefer that to the $50+ per month subscription Adobe forces you into, which is both cost prohibitive to beginners and freelancers and completely unreasonable when you consider that the subscription is for the whole Suite when most people only use one or two programs!”

“They also force you into a year-long contract, which I learned the hard way when I tried to cancel my subscription after six months (since I only needed the Suite for six months) and Adobe told me I’d have to pay my remaining subscription balance in order to cancel early. I would rather pay $200 or even $300 for InDesign once — basically the equivalent of one year of the One App subscription plan — than $600 a year for a suite of programs I’ll never use. Software should be something you pay for once.”

Of all the free alternatives, Kaeden probably likes Autodesk Sketchbook the most. They use it for drawing, and, since art is just a hobby for them, Sketchbook is like a happy medium. “I also use Paint.NET and Canva regularly for photo editing and graphic design. For writing (my actual profession), I mostly stick to Google Docs because it’s what my job requires, but I also use Evernote and I really like the free Grammarly editor, too!”

“Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to suck. Krita is 100% free and I’m amazed by how powerful it is relative to Photoshop. Paint.NET is also free but open-source and highly customizable with the use of plug-ins. Your mileage may vary depending on your job and specific needs, but I personally quit using Adobe after I graduated college and have never looked back. I haven’t needed to. The free and cheap alternatives that exist out there have been more than enough for me.”

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After the huge wave of disappointment, Adobe released an announcement: “From time to time, we run tests on Adobe.com which cover a range of items, including plan options that may or may not be presented to all visitors to Adobe.com. We are currently running a number of tests on Adobe.com.” They also brought back the famous $10 Photography plan which people can order online, via phone at 1-800-585-0774 or via major retailers.

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