Would Scrivener help? There is no subscription. I prefer it to Ulysses.
I avoid subscriptions whenever possible. However there are programs for which I donāt see a viable substitute.
- 1Password family
- Quicken
- Adobe photography
Iāll also mention that Iām a Scrivener user for about 9 years now.
I agree, Scrivener is great on the Mac but I have several issues with Scrivener:
- I do a lot of focused writing on my iPad. I donāt like Scrivenerās mobile app
- I donāt like having DropBox integrated so deeply in my OS.
- I recognize it is a mature app but Scrivener is woefully slow in development and I get the impression that they have had trouble getting updates outāthe slow rollout of the mobile app being a prime example.
- I find the compile feature complicated to get a properly formatted document out to Word, but that is my problem, not Scrivenerās per se.
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See my comment above. 
I was and I like Craft. But the day before yesterday I discovered my Craft subscription had lapsed. I never received a notice about renewing. I think this is because I was getting an education discount, which does not renew in the same way. The free version does not have enough blocksāIām way past what is offered for free.
I was just in the process of trying to decide what to do with Apple Notes now that it is workingāin fact, better than ever. Syncing is flawless and immediate. So I had to consider whether I wanted to pay the Craft subscription and use OmniFocus or Things (the two work well with Craft) or go back to my original (and preferred) workflowāApple Reminders and Notes. Against my better judgment, Iāve decided on the latter. OF is expensive and getting more so, Things is getting long-in-the-tooth and will require an upgrade purchase whenever v4 is released.
So, back to where I was. This is good in a wayāit means that the only reason my workflow was sidetracked was because of the Notes syncing issueānot because I just decided to change.
As Iāve already stated, provided Notes keeps working, my only remaining quandary is Ulysses vs Pages for all writing, including my present book project. Iām torn on this one. Iāll decide soon; Iām still experimenting and doing additional research.
Well, time to get off of the fence. Iām sticking with Ulysses. I created a simple, admittedly subjective and incomplete spreadsheet of my criteria and then āratedā each app. I realize there are caveats and I could footnote those but Iām not going to take the time. Suffice it to say, I know what the caveats are and Iām aware that I may be missing app features in my assessment. But, that be as it may, here are the results.
This confirms my earlier decision to use Ulysses. So, Iām back to where I started before syncing blew up with Apple Notes. I just hope the syncing problem does not come back.
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Just curious. Have you changed any practices related to Apple Notes, such as trying to not move many things around at once, or not make many changes at once?
I am stuck with Adobe Acrobat which is expensive but has a feature that I need that its competitors do not. The expense of this program irritates me because I use it so little but I have one ongoing project that requires it. It is one of those apps that is really not priced for an individual consumer, but rather for businesses to buy licenses for employees. Apparently it is Adobeās most profitable product despite the fame of Photoshop and Illustrator.
I am happy with the Affinity apps to replace Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign. Have you tried these? I find them remarkably good. I would wonder why you do not find them to be a āviable substituteā.
All these are complex apps and it is annoying to have to learn a new one, but eventually the subscription price pushed me out of the Adobe world. In part simply because I did not use the apps heavily. With the old pricing model, I would buy perhaps every other upgrade to decrease my costs, and this was appropriate for my light, non-commercial use. But the subscription model has no āequivalentā for the casual user.
SetApp is $110 a year and includes Ulysses and Craft. It also includes a slew of little utilities that I find useful. It is easy to manage as it is effectively a single subscription for many apps.
For me, SetApp satisfies much of my compulsion to experiment with new apps.
It sounds like you may be trying to escape this compulsion altogether. I am still in its clutches.
The $110 is the lowest price. I pay more for iOS apps and multiple Macs
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I donāt think I can afford to spend much time worrying about subscriptions. Wouldnāt get much work done. Wouldnāt get many invoices sent out.
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When you are retired, you are no longer sending out invoices. You have more time to agonize about subscriptions and less money to pay for them. 
To be a little more serious, I think that fundamentally subscriptions make a lot of sense for software. Managing them is a bit of a pain however.
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These subs are must-haves for me:
- iCloud+
- Setapp
- 1Password
@rlivingston Thank you for the suggestion. Iāve considered SetApp. But I donāt like to ārentā my apps. just as I donāt like to lease vehicles, which I never do. A service like SetApp would āincentivizeā me to create a workflow contingent on multiple apps within the SetApp ecosystem (if one can call it that). While this would give me access to some of the ābest in classā apps, it comes at the price of an annual subscription and the corresponding workflow ālock-in.ā SetApp may be, depending on the number of apps and utilities needed, a good deal, but I prefer, inasmuch as possible, to create a workflow independent of subscriptions. But, that is obviously not an absolutists position as evidenced by my decision to continue using Ulysses. For my workflow, paying a $40 subscription for Ulysses is worthwhile, particularly since I can export all of my work at anytime to markdown files giving me the freedom to move seamlessly and at will.
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Iām being a bit more careful, in particular, Iām careful not to too quickly move from one device to another with AN until Iām sure there has been time for syncing to complete. 
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With Apple Mail, Iāve noticed that if I made a lot of changes (moving some mail to Archive, moving some mail to Trash and emptying Trash, adding Flags, etc) and closed Mail quickly, things became wonky.
Hopefully your AN problems are all in the past. Yes-
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That was my issue with Ulysses, it is a good app but I now use, with no problems Byword, I find it adequate, I am going to have to move and convert any useful notes anyway. I am still waiting from Brett Terpstraās writing app though!! For old times sake almost now!
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I actually donāt bother with the overgrown Photoshop anymore except when I use my infrared modified camera for which Iāve got a Photoshop workflow preset. But I do use Affinity Photo. However the missing item is a replacement for Lightroom. I also use Adobeās cloud which has been more reliable for syncing my iPhone to my Mac than iCloud. Note I also canāt stand Apple Photos but dearly miss Aperture.
Luckily I havenāt needed Adobe Acrobat since I was using Windows about 20 years ago. I needed it for Distiller but the built-in Apple PDF generator was up to the task.
The Byword app is a beautiful, well-crafted, spare Markdown editor.
I would still be using it except I like to copy my Daily Notes into an annual roll-up document that gets kind of large. Byword slows down when dealing with one or two of these large files.
So Iām back to the ever-faithful BBEdit app which stays frisky and barely notices a load with large files. Although itās really a programmerās editor with syntax coloring, I keep finding BBEdit tweaks that make it an acceptable Markdown editor, too.
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when you calculate subscriptions do you include Apple Storage? how about AppleCare+? I find myself able to get rid of app subsciptions but not apple services so I do not āincludeā them as subscriptions.
As I stated in my post, ānot counting Apple Oneā so I donāt include that as a subscription. I also donāt include AppleCare. I consider that part of the purchase price of the hardware.
Iām only referring to app subscriptions.