I'm the perfect candidate for Adobe Creative Cloud. A single creative who does a little bit of everything in digital media using a lot of different software. But they have lost my trust and respect. You probably know the missteps they've taken around AI training, user ownership, and deceptive pricing. They've also totally neglected their products. For almost a decade I've given them over $700/year for barely updated programs that suffer from unacceptable bugs and performance issues.
I don't think it's evil to charge a subscription if you're getting something truly ongoing in return. But software I'm going to invest in learning and using for work, I want to own outright. It's amazing if it's free and open source, but I also love passionate indie companies.
So I've moved on. Creative Cloud is totally off my computer, replaced by a suite of other software I can own forever. For each one of these categories I've looked into all the options and chosen these after taking everything into consideration. Some of them are open source, others are perpetual licenses. But they're all totally capable and fit into my workflow for professional work.
