Cost of creating

I spent most of my working life in what is said called, somewhat overly grandly, “creative industries”. In my case, it was doing design and layout of ads, newspapers, magazines, and various other printed materials. I’ve owned products by Adobe for years—right up until they stopped selling the software and instead made users subscribe to their “Adobe Creative Cloud”—at fees that keep going up. We had no other choice than to accept that because the software was vital to do our jobs. I’m not sure that’s true any more.

Now that I’m not working anymore, it doesn’t make sense for me to pay nearly $100 (roughly $US60) a month so Adobe will allow me to use the software. To be clear, I DO still use their software: I use Photoshop to prepare all the photos I post to this blog, I use Illustrator to create things like album art for some episodes of my podcast, and I use InDesign for general layout work, including all the labels I made for my pantry reorganisation. I’m really glad I have the software when I meed it, but am I nearly $100 a month glad?

Last year, I started researching alternatives to Adobe. At the time, Affinity was highly rated and cost less to buy permanently than paying for only three months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Last year, Affinity’s publisher was aquired by Canva, an Australian-own software company whose site, Canva, is used by people to creat visual assets, like title cards for YouTube videos. Affinity is now “freemium”, but a paid subsription is needed to access AI features (Adobe also offers AI features).

Today I got an email from Apple about their new subscription service, Creator Studio. Some of the programmes are more powerful versions of their free software, like Final Cut Pro to replace iMovie, and Logic Pro to replace Garage Band, but everything seems to have added other things under the paid model, including—surprise!—AI features. Apple also promises to protect users’ privacy.

The various parts of the “suite” can also be purchased separately, basically like all software used to be. As is often the case with Apple, subscription pricing is—interesting. Here in New Zealand, users can pay $24.99 per month ($US15.08), or $249 annually ($US150.30), which is like getting two months for free. This is a fraction of what Adobe charges, but that assumes the Suite is comparable. However: In the USA, Apple charges users US$12.99 (NZ$21.52) per month, or US$129 ($NZ213.72) per year. As usual, in other words, Apple charges overseas users more than it charges users in the USA for something entirely digital.

At the moment, I don’t have a solution to entirely replace the Adobe software I’ve depended on for decades. Rightnow, I think it may turn out that “good enough” will have to be enough. I hjave a lot more research to do. All of which means this is yet another project for this year.