Goodbye Corel, a sad day

Upgrades have ended but Corel support gave me a final chance to upgrade (from X8) to 2019. However, this costs AU$309.00 + AU$140 ("upgrade protection") = AU$449.00.  I already have to spend AU$890 p.a. for an Adobe CC subscription and that's mandatory as all my client files are sent to me in Illustrator or Indesign. On top of that I've now got the Affinity Suite running, which is an absolute bargain at AU$80.00 per application for three apps (photo , designer and publisher, perpetual licences).

I've been using CorelDraw since the first version, so that's 31 years, but over the past decade I've only pulled it out a few times a year for special jobs - processing DXF files or doing logo designs. I still prefer Corel's curve editing approach - I love the way you can delete nodes but retain a curve shape, the right-click menus for adjusting node types etc. and a lot of the more technical aspects. Other things still give me the s**ts but I won't nit-pick all of those here. Basically I stuck with Corel as I wanted to support an alternative to Adobe, and because the package was good value with a big pile of fonts and stock imagery (available as a bulk package, not the "browse in the cloud" pain-in-the-ass that they now offer).

But then Corel (the company) started to change its attitude and is behaving like a baby-Adobe.  It looks like they want to move to a subscription-style approach eventually. That's fine, but if I'm going to rent software I'll rent Adobe CC, as I can make use of Photoshop, Illustraotr, Premiere, After Effects, Dreamweaver and XD at the very least, and Photoshop absolutely kills PhotoPaint.

The final problem is this - I just can't afford to spend AU$449.00 now to get an upgrade to the 2019 version, and I've heard from these forums that CD2019 is a buggy mofo. That means if I ever want to upgrade in future I'd be looking at circa AU$900.00 to get back into CorelDraw, money that can be better spent elsewhere. It's a sad day for me, but I'm going to have to say goodbye to Corel. Maybe it's still good value if you have a shop that works only in Corel, but for me it's just an additional tool for very occasional usage and I can't justify the cost of that any more. I wonder if there are many more peeps like me who just liked having it around for odd-jobs rather than a daily mainstay?

So, goodby CorelDraw. 

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