Tech NewsOpinionThoughtsAfter over a decade of loyalty to the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem, I'm done. I'm walking away, and I've never felt more liberated. This isn't a decision I made lightly—Adobe's tools have been central to my creative workflow for years. But somewhere along the way, Adobe stopped being a partner in creativity and became an obstacle to it.
If you're reading this, you're probably feeling the same frustration. Maybe you've winced at yet another price increase notification. Maybe you've watched your favorite software become bloated with AI features you never asked for. Maybe you're tired of aggressive terms of service updates and a company that seems more interested in quarterly earnings than in the creators who built their empire.
This is my story of why I'm leaving Adobe, and why you might want to consider doing the same.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room: Adobe's pricing has become absolutely predatory.
I remember when Adobe Creative Cloud launched in 2013. The pitch was compelling: instead of paying $2,600 CAD upfront for the Master Collection, you could pay a monthly fee and always have the latest versions. At first, it seemed like a fair deal. The individual app plan started at around $20 CAD per month, and the full Creative Cloud suite was roughly $50 CAD per month.
Fast forward to 2025, and those prices have crept up relentlessly. The All Apps plan now costs $89.99 CAD per month—that's over $1,079 CAD per year. For a single app like Photoshop, you're looking at $29.99 CAD per month, or $359.88 CAD annually. Even the Photography Plan (Photoshop and Lightroom) costs $19.99 CAD per month.
But here's the real kicker: you never own anything. Every year, you're paying Adobe over a thousand dollars just to keep access to your tools. Miss a payment? Your files are held hostage until you pay up. Over five years, that's $5,395 CAD for the privilege of renting software. Over ten years? We're talking $10,790 CAD.
And for what? The software hasn't gotten proportionally better. In fact, in many ways, it's gotten worse.
The price increases never seem to stop, either. Adobe raises prices with the casual regularity of someone adjusting a thermostat, always framing it as necessary to "continue delivering innovation." But from where I'm sitting, the innovation has stalled while the price tags have soared.
Adobe has gone all-in on artificial intelligence, and it shows. Every update now seems to come with some new AI feature plastered across the splash screen, often preceded by the obligatory "powered by Adobe Firefly" badge.
Don't get me wrong—some AI features are genuinely useful. Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop was revolutionary when it first appeared. But now? Adobe is cramming AI into every possible corner of their software, whether it makes sense or not.
Photoshop has generative fill, generative expand, neural filters, and AI-assisted selection tools. Premiere Pro has auto-reframe, speech enhancement, and AI-powered color matching. Illustrator has text-to-vector generation. The list goes on.
The problem isn't that these features exist—it's that they're becoming the entire identity of Adobe's software. Updates are increasingly focused on adding more AI capabilities rather than fixing long-standing bugs, improving performance, or refining the core tools that professional creatives actually rely on.
Many of these AI features feel half-baked, like they were rushed out to beat competitors to market. They're impressive as tech demos but often produce results that require so much manual correction that you might as well have done the work yourself. And Adobe's insistence on making AI the centerpiece of every marketing campaign suggests a company more interested in buzzwords than in building tools that empower human creativity.
There's also an uncomfortable ethical dimension. Adobe trained Firefly on stock images, which is better than scraping the entire internet, but the broader AI push feels like Adobe positioning itself to replace the very creators who made the company successful. It's hard not to feel like you're paying Adobe to develop the technology that will eventually make your skills obsolete.
Remember when Photoshop was lean and responsive? Neither do I, at this point.
Adobe's software has become absurdly bloated. Launch Photoshop and watch your RAM usage skyrocket. Try running Premiere Pro and After Effects simultaneously and listen to your computer's fans sound like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. These programs demand cutting-edge hardware just to run at acceptable speeds, and even then, you'll encounter lag, crashes, and the dreaded "not responding" message.
The bloat isn't just about file size or memory usage—it's about feature creep. Adobe keeps adding features on top of features, many of which most users will never touch. The interface has become cluttered with panels, menus, and options that bury the tools you actually use under layers of unnecessary complexity.
I don't need seventeen different ways to select objects. I don't need a panel for every new AI feature. I need software that loads quickly, responds instantly, and stays out of my way while I work.
The worst part? This bloat isn't optional. You can't download a stripped-down version of Photoshop that just does the basics efficiently. You get the entire bloated package, whether you want it or not, and your system resources suffer accordingly.
Adobe's terms of service and licensing policies have become increasingly aggressive, and it's clear that the company views customers as revenue sources to be optimized rather than partners to be respected.
Let's start with the controversial terms of service update from 2024, where Adobe added language that many interpreted as giving the company the right to access and analyze user content. While Adobe later clarified the language, the damage was done—the company had revealed how it thinks about user data and privacy. The fact that they thought those terms were acceptable in the first place speaks volumes.
Then there's the practice of making it deliberately difficult to cancel subscriptions. Adobe has faced lawsuits over this, with regulators alleging that the company obscures cancellation fees and makes the cancellation process unnecessarily complex. This isn't customer-friendly business practice—it's user-hostile design meant to trap people in subscriptions they want to leave.
Adobe has also aggressively pursued legal action against competitors and individuals in ways that feel disproportionate and bullying. The company seems more interested in protecting its market dominance through legal threats than through innovation and customer satisfaction.
And let's not forget the removal of perpetual licenses. Adobe didn't just add a subscription option—they eliminated the ability to buy software outright. This wasn't about giving customers more choices; it was about locking everyone into a recurring revenue model that benefits Adobe's shareholders at customers' expense.
The company's communication around price increases, policy changes, and controversial decisions consistently feels dismissive. Adobe knows it has users locked in—especially professionals whose entire workflows are built around Creative Cloud—and it acts accordingly. The relationship has become extractive rather than collaborative.
Adobe updates its software constantly, and while staying current sounds like a good thing, in practice it's become a source of frustration and instability.
Every few weeks, there's another update. Sometimes it's a major version bump, sometimes it's a minor patch, but it's always something. And with each update comes the risk that something will break.
Plugins stop working. Custom workspaces reset. Scripts throw errors. Files that opened fine yesterday suddenly have compatibility issues. Performance takes a hit. Features you relied on get moved, removed, or "improved" in ways that disrupt your workflow.
The update treadmill is exhausting. You can't just set up your software once and focus on your work—you have to constantly adapt to Adobe's relentless changes. And because Creative Cloud auto-updates by default, you might launch your software one morning to find that everything looks different and half your tools don't work the way they did yesterday.
For professionals working on tight deadlines, this is unacceptable. Stability matters. Consistency matters. But Adobe's development cycle prioritizes shipping new features—especially AI features—over ensuring that existing functionality remains rock-solid.
The frequent updates also feel like a way to justify the subscription model. Adobe needs to be seen as constantly delivering value to justify the monthly charges, so they ship updates whether those updates are necessary, wanted, or even properly tested. Quality control has taken a backseat to the appearance of continuous innovation.
Here's the good news: leaving Adobe doesn't mean abandoning professional creative work. The alternatives have matured dramatically, and in many cases, they're not just viable replacements—they're genuinely better.
Affinity Suite (Photo, Designer, Publisher): Serif's Affinity apps are the most direct Adobe alternatives, and they're spectacular. Affinity Photo rivals Photoshop for image editing. Affinity Designer competes with Illustrator for vector work. Affinity Publisher is a solid InDesign replacement. The interface will feel familiar to Adobe refugees, but the software is faster, lighter, and refreshingly stable. And here's the absolute game-changer: Affinity is now completely free. After being acquired by Canva, the entire suite was made free for all users. This is professional-grade software that previously cost money, now available at no cost. It's an unprecedented move that makes leaving Adobe easier than ever.
DaVinci Resolve: For video editing, DaVinci Resolve has become the industry standard for color grading and a formidable competitor to Premiere Pro for editing. The free version is incredibly powerful—more capable than many paid alternatives. The Studio version costs $399 CAD as a one-time purchase and includes everything you need for professional video production. The software is faster, more stable, and more focused than Adobe's bloated video suite.
WordPress and Open-Source Tools: For web design and development, WordPress remains dominant and free. Pair it with tools like Elementor or Oxygen, and you have a complete web design ecosystem without paying Adobe a dime for Dreamweaver or XD (which Adobe abandoned anyway).
Other Alternatives: GIMP for image editing (free), Inkscape for vector graphics (free), Darktable for RAW processing (free), Blender for 3D work (free and amazing), Figma for UI design (free tier available), and Canva for quick graphics (free tier available). The ecosystem of Adobe alternatives is rich and varied.
The common thread? Most of these alternatives either have one-time pricing or generous free versions. They respect users. They focus on performance and stability. They don't shove AI down your throat with every update.
Let's do the math on what switching away from Adobe actually saves you in Canadian dollars.
Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps: $89.99 CAD/month = $1,079.88 CAD/year
My Alternative Setup:
Five-Year Comparison:
Ten-Year Comparison:
That's up to ten thousand dollars over a decade—and that's being conservative with the alternative costs. If you use entirely free options (Affinity Suite, DaVinci Resolve free version, WordPress, GIMP, etc.), you could literally spend $0 on creative software while Adobe users hemorrhage over ten thousand dollars.
Even if you need to occasionally buy major upgrades to your alternative software (which companies like Serif handle gracefully with discounted upgrade pricing), you'll still save thousands of dollars.
Beyond the money, there's something else you get when you leave Adobe: freedom.
Freedom from worrying about whether you can afford next month's subscription payment. Freedom from terms of service changes that you have to accept or lose access to your work. Freedom from forced updates that break your workflow. Freedom from feeling like you're being slowly boiled alive as prices creep up year after year.
You own your tools again. You control when and how you update. You're not locked into an ecosystem designed to extract maximum revenue from you while delivering minimum accountability.
The software you choose to use becomes a choice again, not a trap.
I'm not saying Adobe's software is bad. Objectively, much of it is still very capable. But the company surrounding that software has become hostile to users, prioritizing profit extraction over creator empowerment.
Adobe bet that professionals would be too invested in their ecosystem to leave, that the friction of switching would keep people paying forever. And for a long time, that bet paid off. But the alternatives have caught up, and in many cases, surpassed Adobe's offerings in terms of value, performance, and user respect.
Leaving Adobe feels risky if you've been in the ecosystem for years. The learning curve is real. File compatibility can be a concern. But on the other side of that transition is software you actually own, workflows that aren't constantly disrupted by unwanted updates, and thousands of dollars that stay in your pocket.
I'm making the switch. I'm investing the time to learn new tools, migrate my files, and rebuild my workflows around software that respects me as a user. And you know what? I should have done this years ago.
If you're tired of Adobe's prices, bloat, aggressive policies, and AI obsession, you have options. Better options. More affordable options. Options that put you back in control.
It's time to break free. Your creativity—and your bank account—will thank you.
