The rising cost of being a designer
There's a version of this story that starts with cracked Photoshop on the family computer. That version of the story is becoming irrelevant.
What the stack looks like now
In the 2010s, the barrier to entry was low enough. You pirated Photoshop, learned some HTML from a forum (maybe some Flash), and paid five francs a month for hosting. It was accessible.
In 2026, the professional toolkit looks like this:
Figma: free tier exists, but the moment you're a bit serious about it, you're paying
AI subscriptions: Claude, ChatGPT, or API costs that scale with usage
Hosting: Vercel's free tier is generous until it isn't
Specialized tools: ElevenLabs, Suno, Weavy, Lovable, Jitter etc…
Rising token costs
API costs have actually dropped thanks to competition, but usage is exploding. The cheaper AI gets, the more we integrate it, the more tokens we burn. The bill stays the same, or grows.
Current pricing (March 2026) gives you a feel of the range. Claude Haiku at CHF 1.-/million input tokens is cheap for small tasks. Claude Opus at CHF 25.-/million output tokens adds up fast when it's embedded in every step of your workflow. And that's before you consider the next model tier that comes out and immediately becomes the industry default.
Price plans aren't helping
Here's a concrete example of how this plays out. You need a Pro plan to use Figma's MCP server for AI-assisted design to code workflows.
The free tier lets you learn the tool. The Pro tier lets you do the job. And the skills that matter most (the ones that make you hireable) increasingly live on the expensive side of that gap.
Rack'em and stack'em?
I came across an Instagram reel recently where an influencer gives cash to 10 year old kids so they could afford the highest Claude tier to "build their business". Nothing against that in essence, apart from the whole staging that felt artificial.
Apparently, you need a patron, a scholarship, or a credit card to create. The scrappy, self-taught designer who figures it out in a bedroom with no budget is being priced out of the entry point.
What happens to kids who can't afford the stack? Are we training a generation to rely on workarounds and grey-market solutions? Is the next wave of designers going to be filtered by income before it ever gets a chance to show what it can do?
I genuinely don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The silver lining, if there is one
Constraints breed creativity. The 2010s designer who couldn't afford software found workarounds that sometimes became real skills. There's an argument that this pressure could push the next generation toward open-source alternatives, toward questioning whether the full stack is actually necessary, toward getting crafty in ways that produce something new.
Maybe. But "get creative about not being able to afford the tools" is a rough ask when the tools have become the entry point to the profession.
The design community built its identity on accessibility and on the idea that anyone with taste and determination could find a way in.
Yarr!