Accessible alternatives to costly design apps
Affinity, Nano-Banana, and more tools that keep visuals strong and costs low.
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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
Accessible alternatives to costly design apps
From quick edits to full-scale design work, here are my favourite free and low-cost design tools.
Why it matters
Music is consumed through the ears, but sold through the eyes. Engaging graphics define an artist’s identity and influence how fans connect. From artwork to social content, visuals attract fans and convey the brand.
Even when working with designers, teams still need to make small edits, like resizing posts, adding text, and adjusting formats. However, professional suites like Adobe Creative Cloud remain costly, complex, and overpowered for quick tasks.
How it works
As an industry pro, I find myself in the same position as most artists: I’m not a designer, but I occasionally need a design tool. Today, I’d like to share the simple, effective, and budget-friendly tools I prefer to work with.
Please note that while advertising requests are welcome, I’m not getting paid to suggest these tools.
The quick solution
Automation beats opening an app. For quickly resizing images, I use a simple right-click-to-resize tool I created myself in macOS Automator. Here’s how to make it.
When working in teams
Canva is still the go-to for most teams. As a freelancer, it’s not my favourite design tool, but the collaboration features are great. It’s accessible, cross-platform, and ideal for shared templates. While designs can feel repetitive and brand folders get messy, it works well for most use cases.
Go deeper than a web tool
Affinity is an Adobe rival design suite, which I use when working with heavy file formats like pdf, psd, ai, eps, etc, when working with large files, or when I need to do more than just the simple things.
It’s best compared to the well-known Adobe tools as a full-stack and powerful desktop app. I’m sure it’s not a direct copy, but it works great for me. Bonus points for being a European company, until their acquisition by Canva (Australian) in 2024.
The best part is that it’s free. I purchased Affinity Designer and Photo in January 2020 for €72,58, which I think is a good deal already. Last week, in a cringy keynote, Canva announced the new version of Affinity, making it free to use.
The future
I’m impressed with the photo editing capabilities of Google’s Nano-Banana model in Gemini. It enables clothing swaps, composition, realistic scene creation, merging two photos into a new scene, and more, all while maintaining character consistency.
It’s useful for press photos, mockups, virtual clothes try-ons, or other visuals that would typically require Photoshop.
One major drawback is that the output is watermarked, which is ethically acceptable but makes the generated images difficult to use in practice.
Gemini’s generous free quota makes it ideal for learning, experimentation, and early creative testing.
Yes, but..
None of the above covers video. That deserves its own edition. Short-form video remains a core part of visual identity.
Affinity’s free tier may serve as a sales funnel into Canva’s AI ecosystem. Still, the core suite remains powerful and reliable.
Take action now
Artists could test these tools and evaluate which streamlines workflow or saves costs. The aim isn’t to change for the sake of novelty. It’s to simplify creation and reinvest energy into the art itself.
Your thoughts
What are your favourite low-budget design and photo editing tools? Please share them in the comments below.
Further reading
Making a simple image resizing tool using macOS Automator (The Fanbase Builder)
Affinity’s new design platform combines everything into one app (The Verge)
Introducing the all-new Affinity: Professional design, now free for everyone (Canva Newsroom)
Canva acquires Affinity to fill the Adobe-sized holes in its design suite (The Verge)
Image editing in Gemini just got a major upgrade (Google blog)
Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model (Google for Developers)
Google’s latest tools could change how artists use AI (The Fanbase Builder)
Creating stunning websites without coding skills (The Fanbase Builder)