Buy once instead of Adobe Photoshop
5 apps in the directory cover what people use Adobe Photoshop for. 3 of them are a one-time purchases, and 2 cost nothing at all.
Adobe Photoshop costs about $264 a year. At that rate Aseprite, the cheapest dollar-priced replacement at $19.99, pays for itself in 1 month.
Read the catch on each one before you switch — a one-time price is not automatically the better deal, and we say so where it is not.
The replacements
Affinity
the whole design suite, now free for individuals
Free Free
Free, but the download runs through a Canva account and the AI tools need a paid Canva plan
Krita
free and open-source digital painting studio for illustrators
Free Open source
The $12.99 Mac App Store build unlocks nothing extra — it is a donation with auto-updates
Aseprite
pixel art and sprite animation, with a timeline built for frames and tags
$19.99 This version
The $19.99 covers the 1.x series only; a future 2.0 would be a separate purchase
Acorn 8
small, fast mac image editor from a two-person shop
$29.99 Paid upgrades
Each major version is a fresh $29.99 purchase, not a discounted upgrade
Pixelmator Pro
mac-native image editor you can still buy outright for $49.99
$49.99 Perpetual
The one-time build is drifting behind the subscription one, which gets the Warp Tool exclusively