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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

For people who hate or simply can't justify the subscriptions, big shout out to Affinity suite v2. Currently 50% off at $83, permanent universal license for Mac/Windows/iPad

https://affinity.serif.com/

That includes Photo/Designer/Publisher, which are competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign respectively.

It's not a drop-in replacement and if you're collaborating with other people who are in Adobe-land then you'll need to stick with Adobe too. But for people who occasionally need an image editor for solo work and have been priced out of all the Adobe products, it's a solid option.

One caveat is they're now owned by Canva, things haven't gone to shit yet but they might in the future.

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Another caveat is that if your workflow requires dealing with complex text layout on a regular basis (e.g., Asian languages), Affinity suite support for it is pretty much non-existent. For example, lack of a working right-to-left support, no vertical text support for CJK, broken tone markers handling in Thai layout, lack of complex word-break for any languages that is not space-based, etc.

Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.

It's really striking to see two things in this thread: (1) complaints about price, and (2) repeated (cjk, lightroom library management, a half dozen other things) that Adobe offers features that have no competition. Feels like Adobe is charging for being the sole provider for various features that people need.

Photoshop has been around for 34 years, even if they jacked the price up to $500/month nobody would be able to show up with feature parity to compete for 100% of their customers right away. It's a heck of a moat.

Sure, but the thread is also full of people claiming Adobe is rent seeking. Charging a high price for differentiated, unique features that competitors haven't replicated is not rent seeking. That's just capitalism.

"you will also receive free updates until such a time Version 3 is released!"

This is what stops me. I've experienced too many instances of a full version upgrade with a sunset on previous versions.

At $83 though, it only takes 5 months for you to break even on the most basic Photoshop-only Creative Cloud plan ($20/month).

And when they actually release version 3 you can decide whether to upgrade or just stay on V2.

I expect the previous versions to stop getting compatibility updates which is a bigger problem on macOS than Windows, but that's the deal with buying a license vs monthly subscriptions.

It's so much cheaper that I'll take that trade any day. I'm guessing v3 will be an eventual AI focused update since that's an area where they haven't tried to compete with Photoshop in v2.

But you can keep using your previous version after you stop getting updates. With Adobe you have to keep paying, even if you don't care about updates anymore.

Exactly! I will say that Adobe still does add features to the CC subscription[1], but the things I spend 90% of my time using in CC haven't changed all that much in the past decade. I'd be OK with continuing to use an older version. I only have a CC subscription because it's what my employer uses. If we all used Affinity instead, I'd be perfectly OK with that and we'd have more money in the bank.

[1] Contrast that to a company like Salesforce, which charges every year for its core product then adds most of the interesting new features to outside products with separate subscriptions.

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