For years I’ve been a huge fan of Adobe Creative Cloud, for the most part choosing the Photography package. For about £9 per month I was getting access to Photoshop, Lightroom and some other parts of the Adobe ecosystem.

For a small business owner I thought it was a bargain, a no brainer. I’d recommend it to many friends, suggesting it was a great way to get the world’s leading image editing software without the huge outlay of several hundred pounds. I’d been using the plan for about 5 years.

Then I came across the Affinity Suite from Serif. The software consists of Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Each one is, for the most part (and may I say for most mere mortals) a replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Even better, each of the applications can open files from their Adobe counterparts. One of my favourite features of Affinity Publisher is that it can open a PDF back into its editable components, that’s magic!

It all came to a head when I needed to edit a document created in InDesign that I change once a year. To do this I either needed to sign up for an annual InDesign plan @£19.97 and be stuck with it for a year, or rent it for a month for £30.37.

A Tenth Of The Cost

It was at this point I researched the Affinity software and this is the deal right now (correct March 2021 with 50% off), to buy outright any of these products they cost;

• Affinity Photo - £23.99

• Affinity Designer - £23.99

• Affinity Publisher - £23.99

That makes the entire package £71.97. My Adobe Photoshop Rental was £119 per year! Just for one application.

Profit Is What You Don’t Spend

I’m not one of those people who has some dogmatic approach to software rental. You know the ‘I like to own my software’ mantra? I never want to get into an argument with someone who thinks like that and explain to them that they don’t actually own the software, even when they buy it.

My reasoning is a much simpler one. Profit is what you don’t spend. I talk about it in detail in my new book.

I calculate that over the lifetime of my Adobe Photography plan, Photoshop has cost me around £600, that’s for one application. The entire Affinity suite has cost just over a tenth of that amount.

Check them out and you’ll see they represent amazing value for money.

Profit is what you don’t spend.