Adobe Increases Student Pricing to $479.88 a Year – Here’s How to Ditch Them

As of August 1^st, Adobe Student and Teacher plan users worldwide are paying an additional $9.99 per month for access to the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro.

In total, the bill comes out to $39.99 a month – or $479.88 a year – before tax. 

The price increase comes as Adobe unveils new AI features, like the much-touted Generative Fill for Photoshop, inciting more and louder conversations about the imposition of AI on the creative industry. Between that and the inability to permanently buy an Adobe license, many Creative Cloud users are looking to jump ship. 

If you’re among them, look no further. Based on my personal experience as a digital production student and the recommendations of this viral graphic, I’ve compiled a list of comparable alternatives to the following apps: 

• After Effects

• Animate 

• Illustrator

• Photoshop

• Premiere Pro

In the spirit of bucking the subscription model, this list only includes software that are available for free, or that offer a perpetual license for less than the yearly price of the Adobe Student and Teacher plan.

After Effects: Cavalry, OpenToonz, Blender – Honorable Mention: DaVinci Resolve

There is no one app that can replace everything After Effects can do, so this entry will cover a few different tools. 

• For typography: Cavalry

  • Cost: FREE*

  • Supports: 

  • Good for: Typography, layer-based compositing (not node-based)

  • Lacking in: VFX support, 2.5D capabilities*, mesh shape tool*

Cavalry barely makes it onto this list as its paid version is subscription-based. 

* The free version does not offer these key After Effects features. It also caps your export resolution at 1920x1080.

That said, members of the Cavalry community have created tutorials for free users. You can check out some examples to see what it can offer you.

• For character animation: OpenToonz

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: Windows, Mac

  • Good for: Puppet rigging, scanning in traditionally drawn frames 

  • Lacking in: 3D support, reliability for vector art (laggier playback than raster) 

OpenToonz is open source and offers options for Puppet tool animators. It was famously used in Princess Mononoke and The Secret World of Arietty, among other Studio Ghibli films. 

While OpenToonz does offer the ability to arrange assets along the z-axis, it lacks the actual 3D capabilities After Effects has. 3D models cannot be imported directly into OpenToonz.  

OpenToonz also offers separately-obtained tools including IwaWarper, which allows you to wrap still images to reference objects, and XTDS Viewer, for managing exposure sheets digitally. These are free, but not all are supported on Mac.

• All of the above + VFX and compositing: Blender 3D

  • Cost: FREE 

  • Supports: Windows, Mac, Linux

  • Good for: Puppet rigging

  • Lacking in: Ease of procedural modeling (for example, Mr. Mercury effect)

Most creatives have already heard of, if not used, Blender 3D. Open source, free, and even used professionally, will be showing up more than once on this list. Blender’s largest con is by far its learning curve for users used to working in 2D or 2.5D. 

• Honorable mentions: DaVinci Resolve, Houdini Apprentice

DaVinci Resolve’s Fusion tool is a node-based program for motion graphics, VFX, and compositing. This may present a bit of a curve for After Effects users, but is no less powerful. 

Also consider Houdini Apprentice, the free version of Houdini – your exports are limited to 1280x720 a watermark, but you still have access to a very powerful procedural tool. Houdini does not officially make it on the list due to the price of its perpetual license (over $4,000 USD at time of publication), but it is an industry-standard tool, if you can justify the investment. 

Animate – Krita or OpenToonz

• Krita

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: Windows, Mac, Linux 

  • Good for: 2D frame-by-frame animation, users accustomed to Photoshop UI

  • Lacking in: Reliable audio file integration

Krita is an all-in-one software for raster artists, a more powerful version of FireAlpaca with tools you’d expect from Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint, like brush variety and animation tools.

• OpenToonz

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: Windows, Mac

  • Good for: Vector and frame-by-frame animators

  • Lacking in: 3D functionality

As previously mentioned, OpenToonz was made for 2D animation. It aims to recreate the experience of traditional animation digitally. 

• RoughAnimator

  • Cost: $7.99

  • Supports: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

  • Good for: Frame-by-frame animators, mobile/tablet users, audio file integration

  • Lacking in: Vector support, brush variety, tweening

RoughAnimator is pure hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation. It handles sound files the best out of these three apps.

• Honorable mention: Blender

Blender’s Grease Pencil tool can open a new world for users used to 2D animation, but Krita, OpenToonz, and RoughAnimator are ideal for those who want to avoid the learning curve.

Illustrator — Inkscape

Inkscape

• Cost: FREE

• Supports: Windows, Mac, Linux

• Good for: Vector art, user community

• Lacking in: Reliability (reportedly buggy), CMYK support, printability

Inkscape is a free, open source vector art tool, comparable to Blender in its versatility and its large online community. As it is a passion project, it is missing several tools key to professional work and print media—CMYK support is slated to be added in 2026. 

That said, Inkscape is a great place to practice working with SVG graphics—a huge boon in our increasingly digital market.

Photoshop — Krita or Rebelle 8, Photopea

• For illustration: Krita

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: Windows, Mac, Linux

  • Good at: Mimicking Photoshop UI, brush variety

  • Lacking in: Text tools

Krita makes the list once again because of its UI similarities to Photoshop. It lacks some of the vector functionality Photoshop offers, but this can be supplemented using GIMP, another well-known piece of open source software.

• Rebelle 8

  • Cost: $89.99 

  • Supports: Windows, Mac, Linux

  • Good at: Simulating traditional painting, customer loyalty

  • Lacking in: Long-term app support (must pay for updates after certain amount of time)

Rebelle 8 is the latest in a series of apps focused on replicating the experience of traditional painting in a digital software. 

EscapeMotions, creators of Rebelle, notably offer discounts on new versions to users who own older copies. I personally stuck with Rebelle 5, but this option was also available to me when 6 was released. Current owners of Rebelle 7 can upgrade to 8 for 50% off. 

The tradeoff is that the perpetual license only buys you one year of free feature updates and two years of security and bug updates. After that, customers must purchase them.

• For photo-manipulation: Photopea

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: Browser-based

  • Good at: Mimicking Photoshop layout, clone/stamp/content aware tools, generative features

  • Lacking in: Official app/only browser-based

Photopea is a serious competitor to Photoshop – I know I’ve used it to touch up some assignments last minute, though the lack of offline access means I use it very infrequently.

Its generative features are powered by ZoneAI. For hardline rejecters of AI image generation, Photopea is not the app for you.  

Premiere Pro / Premiere Rush – DaVinci Resolve / InShot

• DaVinci Resolve

  • Cost: FREE

  • Supports: 

  • Good at: Color grading

  • Lacking in: Text tools

DaVinci Resolve is an incredibly powerful tool, especially its free version. It condenses all editing steps in one. I’ve found that Premiere is better at DaVinci at handling extra elements like text, even without pre-rendering, so it may require some workarounds. 

InShot is a household name for TikTokers and Reels creators. It’s a great app for lightweight projects or editing on the go. Many users migrated from Capcut as its advanced features become increasingly locked behind Premium. This Premium-creep model is unfortunately common among free apps, so you may need to go software hunting again eventually—however, InShot offers a perpetual license for $49.99. 

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The choice to jump ship from Adobe is not an easy one, not least because of its laborious cancelation process—as long as Adobe remains industry standard, professionals will have to at least own, if not use, Adobe software. The convenience of creating dynamic links across apps in the Creative Cloud is also undeniable. That said, quality alternatives do exist. Creatives will have to pay in time what they don’t pay in subscription fees, should they be ready to come down from the Creative Cloud.