Like KB alluded to, you gotta peel back the layers: someone has to get paid. If YOU are not paying for it out of pocket, you are paying for it in some other way. Either through your taxes, or the collection and sale of your personal information/data. Wrap that in the cloak of "privacy-infringing companies" if you like, but they wouldn't be infringing privacy if people valued their personal information more than a customized news feed. Adobe could do an A/B test: Option 1: $500/year for the Creative Suite, or Option 2: Creative Suite is FREE for everyone... but Adobe gets a perpetual license to everything you make using their tools, or Option 3: Creative Suite is $5/month, but all your data - name, address, browsing history, ad history, etc., is Adobe's to use in any way they want forever. (Hint: This is today's model.) If people had a choice to protect their data, and pay for the software up front (like they used to), I bet that number of users would increase every single year.