Buy once instead of Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Photoshop costs
- $264a year. Adobe's single-app annual plan, prepaid. Their pricing
- Ways out
- 5apps that do the same jobs
- Cheapest to buy
- $19.99Aseprite, which pays back in under a month
- Cost nothing
- 2freeware or open source
Read the catch on each before you switch. A one-time price is not automatically the better deal, and we say so where it is not.
 AffinityThe whole design suite, now free for individuals | FreeFreeware | Free, but the download runs through a Canva account and the AI tools need a paid Canva plan |
 KritaFree and open-source digital painting studio for illustrators | FreeOpen source | The $12.99 Mac App Store build unlocks nothing extra — it is a donation with auto-updates |
 AsepritePixel art and sprite animation, with a timeline built for frames and tags | $19.99This version | The $19.99 covers the 1.x series only; a future 2.0 would be a separate purchase |
 Acorn 8Small, fast mac image editor from a two-person shop | $29.99Paid upgrades | Each major version is a fresh $29.99 purchase, not a discounted upgrade |
 Pixelmator ProMac-native image editor you can still buy outright for $49.99 | $49.99Perpetual | The one-time build is drifting behind the subscription one, which gets the Warp Tool exclusively |