Sorry my up-vote powers down too quickly! We were paying $49 Australian up to last month. A year ago we found a deal and got it for $29 a month for six months. Then it went up to the $49 and this month they put it up to $75 a month which I am struggling with justifying (kids, family, being freelance etc).

So I was looking at all the alternatives i.e affinity designer, Krita, Inkscape etc.

The problem is how much knowledge you then lose.

I have downloaded an alternative pipeline, all free or nearly free tools so if I can get my productivity up on them perhaps I can switch but it comes down to being efficient and how much money you will lose if you aren't efficient. Also everything is unified in creative suite (photoshop reads an illustrator file, premier timeline exports into after effects etc. )

So these are the free solutions I've been looking at to replace the Creative Suite

To replace Illustrator. Inkscape and possibly Affinity Designer.
To replace Photoshop. Gimp and Krita
To replace character animator. I've been exploring Crazy Talk, Dragon Bones and possibly Open Toonz
To replace Adobe Fuse. Make Human and Blender.
To replace After Effects. BlackMagic Fusion
To replace Premier. BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve.

So I think I will try and move to a free/open source pipeline this year but it has complications to do it and then possibly Adobe will realise they went too far and just drop the price again.