As a graphic designer, my journey into the field began with navigating torrent sites — risking trojan horses and malware — just to get my hands on a (hopefully safe) cracked version of Adobe Photoshop. This simply wasn’t driven by convenience; it was a necessity. If I wanted to pursue graphic design, there truly wasn’t another viable path. And this isn’t just my story — it’s the story of countless others trying to break into the creative industry
The first question people might ask is, “Why don’t you just pay for it?” But for anyone who understands the broader context, that question borders the absurd. Adobe Creative Cloud costs around $60 a month — that’s roughly 8,000 Nepali Rupees. To put it in perspective, that’s more than my entire monthly living expenses, excluding rent. For many of us, paying that much for software just isn’t an option — it’s a luxury we can’t afford.
Freemium and tiered pricing models are often presented as more “accessible” options for those who can’t afford premium software. But let’s be honest — they’re not a real solution. What’s the point of a free version that barely lets me do anything meaningful? I might be able to tinker with some basic tools, but I’m still miles behind those who can pay for full access. These models don’t empower — they pacify. They’re bait, scattered just enough to keep you following, hoping, grinding, while the real tools stay out of reach. It is designed to keep me chasing the shadows, maybe make me watch a bunch of adverts while the real fruit stays far from my outreach.
Another question I might have to answer is, “Why not use the free and open-source software (FOSS) Alternatives?” Sounds fair, right? Why even bother with giants of the industry when you can simply download GIMP or Inkscape? But tell that to my client who’s expecting a PSD file from me. Even besides that I might adjust with the clunky GIMP interface but what about all the Adobe patented tools I’ll be lacking that define the modern design workflows. It’s not a debate of Free and Premium or Proprietary and Open Source, it is about the industry standards and what holds me behind. I could cling to the idealism of Free and Open Source Software, preaching digital sovereignty while my clients ghost me. It’d be a professional suicide for me.
Despite me having a huge respect for the FOSS community, the FOSS alternative at surface seems a genuine way to go, they can simply not compete with the giants of the industry. Open-source tools aren’t just lacking features; they’re locked out of the language of global design. Even if developers want to compete, the intellectual property laws and software patents act as legal handcuffs. Beyond that, these projects often lack the institutional support and funding needed to grow and scale. They exist, yes — but who puts food on the table for those developers? The current political and economic system doesn’t reward open, collaborative creation; it rewards monopolies. You can’t expect a community-run project to stand toe-to-toe with billion-dollar corporations backed by legal teams, marketing machines, and decades of brand entrenchment. It’s not just a technological competition — it’s a systemic mismatch.
The Broader Picture
What we are talking about is not merely a problem of a graphics designer, this is a broader ‘failure’ of a system that is systematically engineered to gatekeep labor, creativity, productivity and progress. The plight is the same, for the architects, musicians, or any form of creators who are forced to play the game of the system rigged against themselves, yet claims to be fair. It hails ‘meritocracy’, chants the myth of ‘play fair, work hard’, while hides the essential tools behind paywalls, and shouts out for fair play. This is the problem of all working men who are forced to play this game, and the name of the game is Capitalism.
As many people would like to tell us, this problem exists because “capitalism as it stands is a broken system, we need a fix.” But sorry friend, let me break this down to you, the system is not broken, this is a perfectly functioning system designed for exactly this. Monopolies, exploitation, and the commodification of creativity aren’t glitches — they are inherent part of what capitalism is. To further emphasize on it, this is not some bug in the code, this is the whole code. It is not malfunctioning, this is how it functions. The solution to capitalism is not some patchwork and minor updates, it is re-coding from ground-up. Capitalism needs to be replaced.