This exactly. I am not asking my employer to spend so much money on something I am not using for free in my free time.

Subscriptions are also tricky to "purchase(?)" at some places.

I'm pretty sure I'm not actually allowed to charge them to a grant.

I tried buying a student discount subscription in my country and I could never finish the process.

I then contacted two local partners and none of them allowed me to buy the license as a student. One said that the student discount did not exist, and the other one siad thst my University had to buy it for me.

this. Subscription software models extract more money from the pro market but cut out the casual market completely.

use it for one month. stop paying for it. pay for it again the next month you need it. stop paying for it.

Adobe sells access to Creative Suite in one-year increments exclusively. You can opt to pay monthly, but with a minimum one-year commitment.

I fail to see how this isn't objectively worse than purchasing software outright.

frictionless process, smooth as butter

How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent? There's just this illusive concept people seem to have of owning software. This kind of model would have had me as a legit paying Adobe customer way back when I did "borrow" their software. I never had enough money to buy a >$1k bit of software for a couple of things, but I could have found $50 (maybe closer to $60 if not doing 12 months??) for a month's legit use of the software for a random freelance gig

But Adobe doesn't make it easy to pay for it one month and don't pay for it the next. Their site uses dark patterns which make you choose yearly subscriptions instead of monthly (happened to me even though I thought I had a monthly subscription) and terminating it is a whole ordeal with several steps.

> How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent?

All of these other activities are far from being friction-less. But the problem is that you have to remember to disable the thing otherwise it's going to burn a hole in the pocket and they are counting on that.