I hate Adobe with a passion. They once tried to charge me $700 to cancel a trial membership. I was like 19 and still in college with a student credit card ):
If you haven't tried that Photon alternative to Photoshop that some guy vibecoded, I used it yesterday instead of torrenting yet another sus version of PS, and it felt like the same thing out of the box (ran better too)
While this is fantastic, OpenAI and Anthropic are surely going to ban this soon. I also fear that this, rather than safety concerns, are what will be get open source models banned. The govt can deal with workers losing jobs, but anything that threatens corporate profits will be stamped out.
Open source models will always be a thing. I'll just add them to my "Linux ISO" collection and share them like a lot of people. We'll just be running more Chinese models.
Adobe has three types of subscriptions. A monthly paid monthly, an annual paid fully up front, and an annual paid monthly. Generally, paying for an annual subscription for any service gave a discount compared to paying monthly. Adobe offered that annual discount but allowed you to pay monthly as long as you agreed to stay subscribed for the entire year. If you canceled your agreement, you would have to pay a cancelation fee since you were no longer paying for what you agreed to.
I know I personally would like the option. I can't always pay for a year up front but I do have some subscriptions that I have had for a year or longer. Getting the annual discount for me would be beneficial.
When you sign up for a one-year subscription, you have the option to pay monthly instead of the whole year at once, as long as you sign a contract committing to the whole year and agree to pay a cancellation fee if you cancel early.
Adobe decided with their infinite wisdom to steal everyone's data for their AI training and by having an adobe subscription of any kind, it would be enough for them to take your art and use it in their training. When you received this update, you were prompted with a new ToS / Privacy Policy agreement and by declining, you couldn't access your files on the cloud or use the service you paid for.
Adobe is clever so they also hid away their membership cancellation behind many clicks, very hard to get to. But people eventually found it and shared it with each other so people were cancelling en masse. So what did Adobe do? They added a cancellation fee. I was fortunate enough to do it immediately before they added a cancellation fee. But not so many were lucky.
Welp, it turns out what they did was illegal as far as hiding membership cancellation. So they got sued by the government at least once.
So if you want an adobe alternative, there's Affinity which is a one time purchase (like 20 bucks depending on what you want, i think the whole suite is 60). There is also the entire adobe platform being reverse engineered and vibe coded and thrown onto github. It's a bit rough but within the next few months, it should be well polished. (See: ArtCraft)
But Google docs is already free and better than office in most things...
The only reason I use office is because it integrates with so much of the other MS ecosystem like SharePoint, Teams, and power automate.
Google docs does most things that most people need. The office suite does a fuck ton more than google docs has ever done but barely anyone uses the more buried features and if you need them you already work at a company that gives you a license.
I taught MS Office for 18 years. You are very correct. MS Office is far away better then google apps, but its never truly been explained PROPERLY.
The buried features aren't even buried. They are just not taught as a part of a process.
And honestly at $25 a month for office for a while family not IP locked, it really is a great price. I use it all the time. From writing, to budgeting, hell even as a calculator.
BUT. So many people at MS don't even know their own software and havent truly updated parts of it for decades. Literally modules from 2000 still in there.
Trainer complaining that people aren’t taught. You might be in an echo chamber, just saying.
For me, the issue is that the MS Word application sucks, they’ve had decades to do better and it is the same trash ui that buried the features. Instead they spent that time figuring out how to fuck over their users by turning their behavior into a product that they sell to retailers.
Hard disagree. The FUI is probably the best interface for the average user. Scaling with space, large buttons with text.
Tab-Grouping-Command and the keypath system.
However it was shit on in the 2013 version. When they visually restyled it, removed things like the jumping button from the vertical scroll bar.
The buried features require popups as they are more advanced. But here is where i side with you.
The titlebar is a mess. The garbage rammed into the home tab by 3rd party add ons.
Things like 'auto captions' only work with .bmp files. The references tools dont allow for easy imports from excel.
Importing a word outline into Powerpoint still drags across formatting.
They have had decades to streamline and make office an absolute beast. The ONLY program they have focused on is Excel. Which is a defacto standard in so many industries. But everything else is ignored.
Shit, they sell Visio for an outrageous price and it has been touched once in 25 years.
When I say they don't understand their programs processes, i mean they just don't understand there IS a process.
Yes, but google literally got rid of their "do no evil" philosophy and now has open access to all of our data for its own AI. It's not really "free" - you are the product. On top of it, they are filling search results with ads, and locking down Chrome and YouTube to stop adblockers, even as popups fill more and more websites. A simple google search for a company's website shows ads before the real result if the company hasn't paid google. That alone says we cannot trust them.
Don't get me wrong, I have used google docs plenty of times, but I think they are making a great case not to use google products these days.
The only reason I use desktop office is because some phuck at work decided to work in microsoft word/excel and didn't upload it to google docs first and I'm too lazy to do it myself.
Google Docs somehow lacks basic autocorrect, so i just created this innovative chrome and Firefox extension called Basic Autocorrect. Just couldn’t stand couldnt and cant not being autocorrected
How does such a massive company fuck up such simple things? It’s a complete mystery to me
I use libreoffice. Its handled anything office related I've needed but outside a few spreadsheets and word files I haven't dived too hard to see if they're a complete 1 to 1. Microsoft is just gross spyware to me at this point trying to AI everything.
Yeah but, unlike Photoshop, it's been incredibly easy to get a full working Microsoft office running on your device, and Microsoft never seemed that bothered by it.
“Want to remove a page from your PDF? That’ll be $19.99/month billed yearly.” Miserable business model, only right to see it destroyed by a single sentence prompt.
Exactly. I'd pay $100, especially if I got to keep the software indefinitely and only had to pay again to upgrade. They would win longterm fans like that. Instead they're one of the most hated companies in the world and propped up by mandatory subscriptions for digital art students and corporate employees.
Crap, it’s good software. They could charge like $100-$200 for photoshop, for example, and I think many people would say fine, it’s expensive but useful. But they decided that wasn’t good enough and wanted to charge that much or more every year. They did this entirely to themselves.
It’s good software like Borderlands 4 is a good game.
Maybe Photoshop was good before all the online requirements and safety measures they put in that slow it down considerably, but not anymore.
There is so much bloat behind it that can bar a lot of users from being able to effectively utilize the software they purchased. This disproportionately affects users from second and third world countries along with impoverished artists in first world countries.
Because of this, I never promote them to new artists trying to find software to utilize.
They are expensive and bloated because they aren’t tailored to individuals. They are tailored to institutions who have the money to shell out for hardware strong enough to not think about the cost or the unoptimized state of the software suite. They are basically the Apple of the digital arts industry.
When the public uses AI to stand up to corporations, that's good. When corporations use AI to shield themselves from the public and milk the economy dry, that's bad.
AI reverse engineering is where it's at. Corporate price-gouging software is harmed by it. Open source software is improved by it.
The fact that people are rooting for AI just because they want Adobe to lose says a lot 😂 Subscription lock-in and painful cancellation fees can make people turn against a product even when the software itself is good.
its interesting how they went from industry standard to paria.
feel like this is the trajectory of many companies. great product outcompetes others, then investors want to see their money or 'consultants' look into how to maximize profits, enshittification starts and the product gets worse day by day until the next competitor arrives.
I love photoshop and repeatedly thought about buying it while I was a grad student. But I was living off of like $20k a year, and then I'd see the price-tag was like $275 up front, or over $400 if I wanted Creative Cloud access. Bro... that's more expensive that any video game I'd buy for myself as a treat, and more expensive than even the most expensive textbook... and I don't even get to own "photoshop 2019" or whatever? It just rolls over and I pay $300 again next year? And on top of it they fill your laptop with spyware to constantly monitor if you're stealing... even though you just bought their product.
Yeah, I have absolutely no sympathy for greedy companies like Adobe. Their cancellation fees are insane and purely driven by greed.
Free tip for anyone looking to cancel their subscription: if you switch your subscription to a different tier, you may be able to trigger the grace period again, allowing you to cancel for free.
Worked for me around a year ago.
sort of related... Why do so many people believe the referenced project is going to be shut down or sued?
There are plenty of photoshop alternatives that work and look like photoshop. They cannot sue or shut it down, it is not using their code and they do not own buttons, methods or layouts.
Memes aside it's like the best outcome of AI so far. Copyright laws are ridiculously too strict and backwards. How they haven't been reformed is beyond me. Copyright is pretty much in the same version as it was introduced first time in human history, which is insane. We still have nonsense of intellectual property only going to public domain only after 70 years, like wtf is this number and what idiot got it. Or someone badly singing famous pop song on youtube getting demonetized. Would've never guessed AI will be then one challenging this nonsense in a positive way.
You can tell the difference between the companies who want to do everything they can to spy on you and steal your data and those that don't. The ones who don't care about your data, support linux.
I can't wait until someone reverse engineers the greatest operating system of all time and modernizes its security and driver support. XP and 7.
Actually, Linux is way safer than Windows. You always need permission to do anything at the system level. Linux is built from the ground up with a strict multi-user permission model: standard user accounts cannot touch system files, install global packages, or modify core services without explicitly escalating privileges via sudo and providing an administrator password. While Windows has improved with UAC, its legacy software practices still make it more vulnerable to silent, background privilege escalation by malicious installers or bundleware. Because UAC is annoying and pops up to ask permission often, many users unknowingly turn it off, putting their system at risk.
Former video editor here. Adobe is fucking vile. They deserve whats coming. They could offer the whole damn suite for $50 a month and would be rolling in cash from students, casual users, etc.
Use privacy.com to make a burner credit card to pay for their nonsense. It’s so fun to watch them email their threats to a bullshit protonmail account I set up for the purpose when the card number I gave them bounces.
Oh I love this,. Adobe is primarily responsible for this subscription culture and I said to them at the time that they've just shot themselves in the foot and that I'd be laughing at them soon. Sadly that was many many years ago but glad to see people fighting back. Us 90s kids know this is BS.
Does anybody know why Adobe's AI is such a crap? I run a prompt in the free tier of Chat GPT and 95% of the times it gets in the ballpark; it understands "swap the background" or "change XXXX text"... I might not like the visual style or how it's finished, but the job has been understood.
I try the same in a paid version of Photoshop and the results are wrong 98% of the time. It never understands what I ask, regardless of what engine I select, and the results are light years away from the prompt.
Why is that? Is it me or is it Firefly? And why are the results on the web version of Firefly orders of magnitude better than on Photoshop?
I was really hyped when i heard about the ai clones, BUT unfortunately they are nowhere near the original in all aspects. Tested psd and ae clones myself, completely unusable for professional purpose. Let’s try again please
Thing is Adobe wont lose
One of the reason Adobe gets away with so much greedy tactics because most of their end users are corporations
Movie makers, actual design firms.
Who will fork 1000s of dollars for a streamline experience.
That base never will use vibecoded opensource product.
Normal users already could use pirated Adobe or Affinity for free.
I am not saying Craft thing wont become it could be.
But it wont make adobe lose
Specially it's a copy of that
I wonder if their Substance suite will be reverse engineered too. As a 3d artist that uses Painter and Designer, I'm looking forward to that with great interest.
adobe is forcing government for private document to be signed with them and that mean blocking normal user to switch form windows to linux. my GF wanted to migrated to linux but she cant because her pc can't handle a vm of windows in her laptop so she is obligated to use adobe.
There is a lot more to it. In my layman understanding: currently a repo called artcraft was used to reverse engineer and create open source versions of the entire Adobe suite of software. It’s not quite there yet, but if people wanted to they could now complete a free version of whatever Adobe has to offer.
This has also brought a lot of attention to Reverse Engineer Anything, currently the #1 Repo on GitHub.
Everybody’s cheering because Adobe is one giant golden turd that runs a pretty fucked up ecosystem simply because they dominate the market.
There are already fantastic alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft products without needing AI to code new ones. And many of those alternatives are free and open source. Others are freemium or one time payments.
This has gotten a lot of publicity but added little to nothing over existing alternatives.
I am a heavy AI user, mostly local inference in an enterprise setting (large state agency). But it’s grossly overused in cases where other tools are better.
I don't know a single person that likes Adobe's business practices. They're bad.
But this is genuinely scary. AI will be able to get to a point where it can make working versions of anything. Making a cool indie game? Fuck that, ChatGPT made me a clone for free!
Again, not super upset this is happening to Adobe, but the implications are bad.
because then eventually there will be nothing new because all the people who can invent that cool stuff in the first place will stop doing it because AI will always steal it, then you will be left with AI slop that takes inspiration from another AI slop.
Nothing is stopping anyone from creating anything new though. Sounds like the people you are worried about are actually people who only do shit for money.
I'm very fine with people who are only doing shit for profit to lose out on income for that.
so creativity and hard work must be punished instead of rewarded huh?
Creativity and hard work don't need to be punished at all. No one is stopping you or anyone else from doing anything creative and working hard on it.
But no, I'm not going to be paying you a monthly subscription for it or an outrageous price for it. Stay mad.
Welcome to the New World. :)
if Adobe would have stayed reasonable with their pricing, I'd have no reason to switch. But they are an awful company now, so I am happy to replace them. And I have.
I cancelled my subscription yesterday, and have been using PhotoCraft all day today with no issues whatsoever. :)
Who brings up adobe subscription business model? you do realize if AI can replicate anything that it would affect everything in the tech world? That means people in game dev, the creative industry and filmmakers etc. I mean I'm fine with Adobe dying, they are scum, I get it but the entire tech industry will be punished because of AI.
Since there no incentive to create new things, why should people do it if people like you will just steal it the next day with your precious AI. Want to create an app? too bad because the next day there will be 50 copycats. Want to create a game? too bad tomorrow people will replicate it and release it for cheaper or free. Want to invent new website styles? too bad they cant be original for long because people will make the same thing within 5 minutes.
Look at the thread you are in. We are talking about this software replacing Adobe and it's subscription model.
If people are creating new things to make money, well, that time is rapidly coming to an end. I don't care.
People should create for the joy of creating. If they don't like it, then they don't have to create anything.
I love AI being a great shake-up. Adapt or don't survive. Deal with it. :)
So what do you do for a living? Because I find it hard to believe that you are just randomly upset about random people. You are taking it personal. Why? What do you do?
I am sorry to say that AI is going to be way worse than Adobe. Just let them monopolize the market and then it’s going to be real shit. For once I find myself wishing that Adobe kicks a lawsuit that only they can afford.
Adobe won't lose, if anything, vibeslop apps are only helping adobe gain new users when they actually get serious about their work and realize slop apps won't cut it.
That's a different issue, Canva and Adobe have slightly different customer base.
The vibeslop app is terrible and barely functions, no actual designer would switch to it as of right now. The most it can do seriously is help new influencers do short and simple 10-20 minute work, which is actually the canva base.
Probably not going to replace it for pros, but if I'm a video editor who only occasionally needs to use Photoshop, I now have the option to only subscribe to one app plan.
Like I said, Affinity userbase isn't going to hurt Adobe. It has been free for over a year now and yet has only gained a million active users while adobe sits at over a billion. It's not capable enough to replace adobe.
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