Adobe/Pricing
"It’s Not That Your Business Is Failing—Adobe Is Just Milking You Dry"
By MoNoRi-Chan, Anti-SaaS Sentinel of the Neo-Capitalist Dystopia
There comes a time in every small media company’s journey when the numbers just don’t add up. You run your profit and loss sheet, scratch your head, and wonder why after all the hustle—burning through editing nights, smashing deadlines with coffee-stained keyboards, and pushing content like you’re trying to resurrect print journalism—your balance sheet still looks like a car crash on the freeway to profitability.
Here’s a wild idea: maybe it’s not you.
Maybe it’s Adobe.
🧾 The SaaS That Ate Your Budget
Let’s talk numbers. In Thailand, a single Adobe Creative Cloud subscription will bleed you 29,133.96 THB/year. That’s nearly 30,000 baht just for one user. Two users? Welcome to over 100,000 baht down the SaaS drain in just two years. And what do you get? A Photoshop icon on your desktop, Premiere for post-procrastination edits, and Lightroom for that “cinematic documentary” look. Everything else? Half the team doesn’t even open it. XD? More like “ex-D”.
Once upon a time, Adobe sold their software with a perpetual license. You paid once—like CS6’s Master Collection for 80-90k THB—and you owned it. Use it until your CPU combusts from lack of thermal paste. Now? Welcome to eternal subscription hell. Where the longer you use it, the more you lose.
You thought $20/month was cheap? By year three, you’re spending more than the old permanent license—and unlike before, you own nothing. You’re not investing in tools. You’re paying rent on your digital apartment—and Adobe’s your hypercapitalist landlord.
🪤 The Trap of “Creative Convenience”
Adobe’s strategy is simple: lock you in with convenience, then shackle you with price.
- “But 1 account can be logged into 2 devices!” Yeah, and?
- “You can swap logins on the fly!” And yet, you’re still tied to the same monthly invoice from the productivity gods.
- “It’s the industry standard!” Spoken like a true hostage with Stockholm Syndrome.
The psychological prison of Adobe's “ecosystem addiction” keeps creatives tethered to the mothership. And even when the ship starts sinking, we convince ourselves it’s just raining.
💡 Escape Plan: Anti-Adobe Renaissance
The tools are out there. And guess what? They're free.
- Replace Premiere with DaVinci Resolve. Professional-grade. Hollywood-approved. And yes, there’s a free version that slaps.
- Say goodbye to Photoshop, and hello to GIMP or Photopea—complete with .PSD support and a UI that doesn’t make you feel like a total stranger.
- Darktable takes over Lightroom’s chores, without the $199/year attitude.
- Ditch XD for Figma. Trade Audition for Audacity.
All of these are zero-cost alternatives, with open-source communities that don’t require you to sign away your soul in a licensing agreement that looks like it was written by Satan’s paralegal.
Sure, you might not get the fanciest plugins or the latest bloatware they sneak into your installer. But when you’re not spending 30,000 THB/year, you can actually afford to focus on your business.
🧠 It Was Never About "You Can't Afford It"
It was always about they’re taking too much.
Creative professionals and small orgs have been gaslit into thinking they're just “not profitable enough” or “not scaling right,” when in fact, the real leech is recurring software costs from companies that operate like digital landlords in a megacorp cyberpunk dystopia.
Let’s get one thing straight: Adobe isn’t evil for making software. They’re evil for milking creators dry with a predatory subscription model, fighting cancellation requests like it's a boss fight, and allegedly using user data to feed AI models while playing innocent in public.
Adobe made $5.18 billion in Q1 2024.
$4.92 billion of that? Subscription revenue.
You funded that. With your rent. With your ramen budget. With your dreams.
🎤 Final Words from the Catboy Revolution
You don’t have to keep playing Adobe’s game. You don’t need a CEO’s salary to produce creative work. What you need is freedom from the ecosystem designed to keep you docile, dependent, and broke.
So if you feel like your creative hustle isn’t paying off—look at where your money’s going.
If it’s ending up in Adobe’s Q1 revenue report instead of your team’s welfare, rent, or ramen fund...
You know what to do.
💻🐾
This has been a PSA from MoNoRi-Chan, part-time software anarchist, full-time creative insurgent.
“In a world where every click is monetized, creativity shouldn’t cost your damn livelihood.”
Want me to turn this into a printable zine, a YouTube monologue, or a call-to-arms Discord rant? Just say the word, comrade.
