Readers’ Poll: How Much do You Spend on Tools?

Readers’ Poll: How Much do You Spend on Tools?

on Jun 13th 2012 with 11 comments

Have you subscribed to Adobe’s Creative Cloud? Did you find yourself downloading Coda 2? I imagine there are plenty of other services you subscribe to – DropBox? Evernote? Apps you can’t help but make a grab for – Alfred? Sublime Text 2? Are you a Dribbble Pro user? Do you subscribe to educational tools? Purchase books often? Not to mention all the shiny toys unveiled by Apple this week..

With all these small payments (plus the big, obvious ones) there’s a chance you’re spending a fair whack of your earnings on the very tools you need for your web design trade. The odds are you spend quite a lot on toys you don’t really need at all! I know designers who’ve bought trucks full of mobile devices for testing their designs – and of course, we all need computers and peripherals.

So I’m interested – what would you say your average monthly budget is for tools?

Obviously, this will vary depending on your work/study situation, where in the world you live (don’t get me started on what we Europeans pay for Creative Cloud compared with The States), but let’s see if we can get some ballpark figures here.

 
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Hi there! My name's Ian Yates. Welcome to Webdesigntuts+ :)  

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  • http://www.johnbowie.co.uk John B

    I have been lucky by recently being a full-time student.

    This allowed me to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite cheaply and also using Microsoft Dreamspark which got me great tools like Visual Studio Professional 2010 for free.

    • http://www.ciwan.me.uk Ciwan

      How much did you get the Adobe Creative Suite for ? Was it CS6 ?

  • http://www.daihuws.me.uk David H

    A great deal of the tools of the trade are actually free of charge; I haven’t come across a better text editor for doing what I do than Vim. Sublime Text 2 is prettier, but I can’t seem to open files using only the keyboard (maybe I’m doing it wrong?) so it’s significantly slower to work with than Vim, despite it replicating some of Vim’s keyboard shortcuts. In addition, the find and replace keyboard shortcuts from Vim don’t seem to work in it either.

    On top of that: every important JavaScript library, scripting language, web application framework and content management system that you’re likely to consider using is free and open source. I’ve yet to be convinced of the necessity of shelling out lots of money on proprietary software or on Apple Mac.
    (Granted, I can’t run Coda under Linux, but I doubt that it’s worth the expense.)

  • Saud

    in fact , I don’t pay anything for tools : )
    I use all things FREE , if you say tools ? like what ? coda just ?
    I mean what do you need to use for before : )

  • http://iqonicdesign.com Ari

    Since I use a Mac, I don’t have to pay that much for my tools. Photoshop, Coda/Espresso, and Pixelmator are one-time purchases, and on Mac App Store, updates are free. :)

    • TJ

      The downside is, you have to use a Mac.

  • http://kriix.com Kristijan

    For now the only application I ever payed for is Sublime Text 2 (http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-beta). The most part that influenced buying it was the fact that it didn’t nag me about it or request it to enable some functions. Till then I used gedit but as @David H. stated above, there is no Coda for ubuntu but all the other tools really needed to work are available for free.

  • Mike

    Thankfully, All I need to get by is Adobe, which I use Creative Cloud which is probably the best investment I’ve made in a long time. Between 20 GB of storage, Typekit, all the apps in Master Collection and BusinessCatalyst hosting, it really is valuable.

  • toni

    i love your site