At some point in the last eighteen months, the monthly cost of running a mid-tier creative or productivity setup quietly crossed a threshold most people haven’t consciously noticed yet. Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, Notion AI, Spotify, iCloud+, a password manager, a VPN - stack them up and you’re looking at somewhere north of $150 a month before you’ve touched anything specialised. That number was unthinkable for consumer software a decade ago.
The repricing has been gradual enough to avoid outrage but sharp enough to change behaviour. Adobe raised Creative Cloud prices multiple times since 2022. Notion added AI as a paid tier rather than a feature. Slack, which spent years being aggressively free for small teams, has steadily compressed what’s available without a paid plan. Each move looks defensible in isolation. Together, they represent a structural shift in what it costs to use software as a professional.
The justification most companies reach for is AI. Integrating large language model features costs real money in compute, and vendors aren’t wrong about that. But the framing often obscures what’s actually happening: AI is being used as cover for margin recovery. These companies built their user bases on low prices during a period of cheap capital and aggressive growth targets. That era is over, and the bills are being sent to customers.
What makes this harder to absorb than previous price increases is that there’s no obvious ceiling. Perpetual licensing - buying software once and owning it - has been effectively eliminated at the consumer and SMB level for most major tools. You can’t just stay on Photoshop CS6 forever in good conscience anymore; compatibility, security, and file format support all decay. The subscription model removed the exit ramp.
Some tools are starting to show cracks under the pressure. Figma’s community forums have seen genuine friction around its 2024 pricing restructure, particularly from freelancers and small studios. Affinity - which sold perpetual licenses at a fraction of Adobe’s cost - was acquired by Canva in 2024 and subsequently moved to a subscription model, closing what had been one of the last credible off-ramps from the Adobe ecosystem.
It’s genuinely unclear where this ends. Open-source alternatives exist for almost every paid tool, but the switching costs - in muscle memory, file compatibility, plugin ecosystems - are steep enough that most professionals don’t make the jump until the pain becomes acute. We’re probably not there yet. But the trajectory is legible, and the math is getting harder to ignore.