Serif’s Affinity suíte of products is by far the most credible competition and suitable replacement for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Anyone dissatisfied with Adobe (you should be) ought to consider these alternatives. They’re polished, well supported, have received a constant stream of quality feature enhancements, and are traditionally licensed.<p>They won’t work for everybody, but there is a large cohort of Adobe users out there that could instantly substitute their software with minimal effort and get out this absurd predicament.
Yeah - they're horrid. My last experience with them was that they couldn't bill a <i>perfectly</i> valid credit card (tested multiple times at other places during the issue with zero problems). NO idea why... called multiple times to sit on hold and hear "it's fixed!" only to receive a billing failed notification two days later. I let it lapse and now they're not getting $60/mo from me - tough cookie for them I guess.<p>After wasting over 1-2 hours of my time on hold/with customer support people who could care less I just figured it wasn't worth throwing my money at them anymore if they literally won't take it.<p>Also there's the experience of having to use old versions of Adobe Illustrator because the newest copies just wouldn't work with Windows 7/10. When searching the issues at the time it was apparent <i>everyone</i> had to go back a version if they didn't want it to crash every 20 minutes!<p>Adobe is an embarrassment of a software company and reading these other horror stories doesn't surprise me at all. For the time being I'm getting along just fine with an old copy of the CS5 Master Collection that's 10 years old =)
Adobe has upped their scumbag strategy recently. I needed to use Acrobat for one task, so I signed up for a free trial. Of course, I forgot to cancel it and got charged $15. I then went to go cancel my subscription completely and found that they wanted to charge me a $30 early termination fee on top of that!
$35/mo for all adobe products is a pretty good deal. It’s low enough to make people reconsider whether catching a virus from Piratebay is worth the hassle.<p>Companies are usually vulnerable to social engineering attacks. It’s arguably the most successful attack vector. I’m not excusing Adobe’s failure in this case – they should do better – just saying that it’s reasonably common.<p>EDIT: I didn’t know they do things like early termination fees. That’s pretty bad.