Creative Software Subscription Cost Calculator

The monthly number misleads; the annual one decides

Twelve euros a month doesn’t seem expensive to anyone. That’s exactly why prices are advertised that way. But a two-person studio with design, editing, transcription and stock is spending around a thousand euros a year before storing a single file, and that figure no longer gets approved without a second thought.

The second trap is seats. Almost all of these tools charge per user, so spending doesn’t grow when you produce more: it grows when people join the team. A freelancer who works with you for three weeks can cost a full month of licenses.

Which part of this you can stop paying for

The useful distinction isn’t between expensive and cheap tools, but between the ones that compute and the ones that store things.

• • Editing video: it’s compute. Your processor does it. The watermark on free plans is a business decision, not a technical limit.
• • Designing assets: it’s compute. What costs money in Canva isn’t the editor, it’s the template and stock catalog.
• • Transcribing: it’s compute. Whisper runs locally and the audio never leaves your machine.
• • Storing and sharing: not compute. It takes up disk and uses bandwidth every month. There will always be a bill here, whoever sends it.
• • Stock libraries: not compute either. It’s a license to someone else’s work, and if you need it, you pay for it.

Before you cancel anything

Make sure you can get your work out. In closed tools, older documents stay locked inside and what you take with you is a PNG: a snapshot of the design, not the design itself. Export first in a format you can reopen and confirm it really opens. Cancelling is easy; recovering three years of work isn’t.