Switched to Affinity, Photo, Designer and Publisher are pretty awesome and a true replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Switched 1.5 years ago, never looked back and saved a lot of money in the process. There are a few things it doesn’t have, but its impressive nonetheless. The devs are very committed to speed and anti bloat.
FWIW, I think Adobe actually adds quite a bit to Creative Cloud every year, plus they offer fonts and connections with their mobile apps and such as part of the same price. Creative Cloud today is a very different beast from CS6.
(obdisclaimer: I worked for Adobe several years ago, but have no current stake other than being on the CC photography plan)
Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user.
I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.
Did a stint on Sketch as well. It’s now gone subscription, but it think it’s the more acceptable “still works but you stops getting updates” type subscription like jetbrains.
What I really want is an Affinity photo library manager like Lightroom. I’ve looked at some currently available options and not been impressed, but there were tweets to the effect that Affinity was thinking about it.
Best I’ve found is “considering it,” but fingers crossed! Seems like the next obvious step after vector illustration, photo editing, and desktop publishing
And I think all the plans come with cloud storage which syncs across devices.
I fought the subscription plan for LR, but realized I usually updated yearly and had this complicated file management system for my photos. For $120/year I have the latest LR versions on all my devices and only have to worry about true backup.
I do keep an eye out for a LR replacement, but I haven't found anything that comes close to LRs file management.
Intuit Quickooks is same way. Hasn’t substantively changed in 20 years but they stop you from importing new data if you don’t update to latest every 3 years. They need some real competition.
