Hey everyone,
I wanted to start a serious discussion about the barrier to entry for starting a digital career or business from scratch today. Whether you are trying to be a video animator, a graphic designer, a content creator, or even just trying to handle the marketing for a new small business, it feels like the barrier isn’t “skill” anymore—it’s money.
I am a beginner with a limited budget (under 20 euros/month), and I’ve noticed a frustrating pattern across the entire industry, not just in photo editing:
- The “Paywall” on Basic Creativity It seems like every single tool required to launch a project is fragmented and expensive.
- Want to do basic graphic design or remove backgrounds? You hit a daily export limit unless you pay.
- Want to create simple video animations or motion graphics? The good templates or “smart” rendering features are locked behind a Pro tier.
- Need help with copywriting, SEO, or brainstorming marketing ideas? The platforms that help speed this up require credits or monthly subs.
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The Fragmentation Trap If you try to do everything yourself (the “solopreneur” route), you theoretically need a “tech stack” of 4-5 different subscriptions. One for video, one for design, one for market research/analytics. Even if you have the vision and the time to learn, the tools fight you. I recently ended up paying for a full year of a simple photo editor just to get access to basic cutting and glitch effects because the free limit was 3 files a day.
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The Impulse Buy Model Many of these platforms lure you in, but they don’t scale. You buy a subscription thinking it solves your problem, only to realize it doesn’t understand your specific vision, and you’ve wasted money on a tool that limits your creativity rather than helping it.
So, for those of you who started with zero budget:
-> Is it still possible to be a “Jack of all trades” creator without spending hundreds a month on software? -> Are there any robust “All-in-One” tools that cover video, design, and marketing basics without aggressive limits? -> How do you manage the costs when you are just starting out and not making any money yet?
Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating this expensive landscape.
Yes it is.
Look into Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives. You can just do an internet search for “____ foss alternative” and you should be able to something useable. You might have to learn different hotkeys or workflows but it’s better than paying a creativity fee in my opinion. Note that the free in FOSS is for freedom, not $0.00. Some FOSS tools might cost money or might be financed by paid support.
All the posts I’ve ever made here have been created using FOSS.
Another thing is to prioritize things that you can run locally or self host. An offsite storage backup that you own won’t be used to train a generative model, but the same can not definitely be said for onedrive or gcloud.
Your specific questions in this post can’t really be answered however unless you state your medium. There is a big difference between feilds like photo editing, game development, and music creation.
osalt.com - Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software
is handy too.
alternativeto.net is much better
…only for the F-Droid setup guide
https://alternativeto.net/lists/28655/the-ultimate-f-droid-setup/
Before monthly subscriptions there were yearly ones of several thousands of dollars, and before that it was a huge lump sum in the tens of thousands for most software with one off costs which in some cases included purchasing proprietary hardware to actually use the software. Subscriptions and start up entry costs have always been bad.
The legal way is to be affiliated with an educational institution as they take on those costs and you can use the software they purchase. Or in some cases you get access to educational licenses to learn a software that you can then credit to your portfolio and CV so you can be employable.
Though these days free open source and piracy are easier than ever, so it’s more about finding a workflow with a set of tools that you can do what you need to do, to create what only you can create which in the end is what will set you out from the rest.
It’s rare these days that someone is going to ask for files in a proprietary format, so it’s actually easier to produce a result that someone is able to consume, technically speaking.
- For print and digital images both bitmap and vector, https://www.photopea.com/
- For 3d/2d rendering, animation, compositing and video editing https://www.blender.org/
- For motion graphics, editing and compositing https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
- For audio https://www.audacityteam.org/
- For programmatic image editing and conversions https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenImageIO
- For programmatic video editing and conversions https://www.ffmpeg.org/
Add darktable to the list for raw photo editing. Blender for 3d modeling/animation, hell it even has a video editor now.
If Davinci Resolve seems complicated then Kden Live is another open source alternative.
It’s definitely possible to get started in almost all major creative endeavors using almost exclusively foss. It will require a little more effort in some cases but a lot of these tools also have good free plugins. I typically recommend people start there until they find a propietary software that is a must for their creative/marketing niche.
For me that was a DAW. I worked with what I could for 5 years before I finaly “splurged” on Ableton Live which luckily is NOT subscription based.
- Affinity for photoshop alternative just went free, don’t know how long that will last.
- Gimp just got a brand new UI, but I haven’t personally checked it out yet.
- Krita is a great paint program for free.
I was going to chime in with something similar. It used to not be free to be creative before (unless you pirated). It was actually more expensive. You had to work full time in person at a studio, or be a student, to have access to creative software. I think the idea of freemium has ruined the expectations of people a bit, as people expect things to be for free.
That being said, I don’t think there’s been a cheaper time to be a digital creative, because of all the open source and free options people have now. Will you be able to keep making money from for the long run? Probably not, but it can remain a hobby.
its not just graphic design either. The heavy push for monetization on sites like youtube and twitch is also impacting new creators as well. Like for example twitch forces a pre-roll (an ad that plays before you can even see the content) for anyone who doesn’t run at least 3 minutes of ads an hour manually. I sometimes click on a creator out of curiosity but, all interest is lost as soon as I see the 40-60 second pre-roll ads. This impacts newer creators a lot more than big creators, but it seems they are the ones hit the hardest with said ads.
this is the way with SCIENCE papers, its all paywalled, well most of them. unless you work at a university or a student there, it will be free.
It certainly makes things more difficult but there’s usually a free tool that will do the job well enough. Gimp can be used to remove backgrounds for example.
If you absolutely want to use websites, there’s usually multiple options available so it’s easy to cycle between them. There’s hugging face spaces that I use as well for the more complicated stuff.
Piracy or FOSS are your two options. After you’ve finally stabilized in a good career with decent income, you may start purchasing licenses for better convenience.
At this point, it absolutely is killing the creator economy, especially considering that you won’t use many of these proprietary pieces of garbage for software due to their malicious pricing schemes designed to suck money out of you. This has to do with ownership becoming a myth, and instead, controlling what one bought and paid for is the way to go for the future.
That’s where Free Software comes into play, when applied correctly.
For years I did just fine editting and drawing using a cracked version of Photoshop CS2. I think I used it up until 2017 if not longer. There’s also a lot of free alternatives out there. Sometimes the free alternatives don’t look as good, but often they have all of the features you need, if not more.
I currently use the free video editing program on windows for my shorts and reels. It’s not the most feature rich, but it works for short videos. I also use canva for some things. If you know where to look, you can get canva pro for free by joining a school group.
The real barrier imo is time. It takes a lot of time to plan, create, edit, advertise, interact with the community, find free resources, etc.
No just don’t use that stuff. AI slop is a much bigger hazard.
