The twelve subscriptions and the group chat
Somewhere between the third Adobe license renewal and the second annual Canva price increase, someone on your design team quietly stopped opening four of the tools you pay for. They did not announce this. They did not file a ticket. They simply stopped logging in, the way you stop visiting a gym membership you bought in January, except this gym charges $70 a month per seat and penalises you for trying to leave.
This is not your design team being difficult. This is the entire industry.
We call it The Subscription Graveyard, because that is what your creative tool budget has become: a quiet resting place for licenses that served their purpose once, or never did, and now exist only as line items that nobody has the procurement energy to kill.
51%
Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index found that 51% of all purchased SaaS licenses sit idle, the highest waste rate the report has ever recorded. Organisations waste an average of $21 million annually on software nobody opens. Collaboration tools, the category design platforms fall into, show a 58% waste rate, the highest of any SaaS category measured.
Zylo 2025 SaaS Management Index
1,200/day
Harvard Business Review studied 20 teams across three Fortune 500 companies and found that workers toggle between applications 1,200 times per day, losing four hours per week to reorientation alone. The University of California, Irvine measured the recovery cost at 23 minutes and 15 seconds per interruption.
Harvard Business Review / UC Irvine
$150M
Adobe charges $69.99 per month for Creative Cloud Pro, $840 per year per seat. That price rose 17% in June 2025. Cancelling early triggers an early termination fee of 50% of remaining payments, a practice the U.S. Department of Justice found sufficiently problematic to extract a $150 million settlement from Adobe in March 2026.
U.S. Department of Justice / Adobe
136%
Figma's net dollar retention rate is 136%, meaning its enterprise customers spend 36% more each year without adding a single new user. The company now has 1,405 customers spending over $100,000 annually. Once your design system lives in Figma, the switching cost compounds every quarter. You are not choosing Figma each year. You chose it once, and now it chooses your budget.
Figma earnings data
Canva raised its Teams pricing 300% in late 2024. But Canva simultaneously made Affinity, the professional-grade suite they acquired, completely free. Affinity covers photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout at a level that competes with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. The price is zero. Adobe's comparable suite costs $840 per year. Yet most teams have not switched, because switching means rebuilding templates, relearning workflows, and navigating the procurement inertia that created The Subscription Graveyard in the first place.
Design tools evaluated for buyers, not designers
We evaluated the platforms on cost, utilisation risk, switching exposure, and what happens when you try to leave.
Figma
Design infrastructure default for product teams and agencies. Real-time collaboration, developer handoff, and design system management are genuinely best-in-class.
136% net dollar retention rate means your spend only increases. Migrating an organisation-wide design system out of Figma is a project measured in months, not days.
Try FigmaCanva
Template-first approach making professional output accessible to non-designers. AI features and brand kit management are genuinely useful for teams that need volume over precision.
The 300% Teams price increase signals that Canva's affordable era is ending. Design teams doing complex product work will outgrow it.
Try CanvaFramer
Collapses the design-to-website pipeline into a single tool. For marketing sites and landing pages, the speed advantage is real.
It is a website builder with design tools, not a design tool that builds websites. Teams needing full design workflows beyond web will need another platform alongside it.
Try FramerVisme
Presentations, infographics, and visual content creation for teams that need polished output without a dedicated designer on every project.
Occupies a niche between Canva and PowerPoint. Teams with access to either may struggle to justify the additional subscription.
Try VismeWebflow
Visual builder that outputs clean code, giving design teams direct control over production websites and removing designer-developer handoff friction.
Learning curve is steeper than the marketing suggests. Pricing scales aggressively with client sites and CMS usage.
Try WebflowWe built a comparison of design platforms evaluated on total cost of ownership, utilisation risk, and exit costs, the three things vendor websites never mention.
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