I am pro and don't use cloud software in production, actually this is a clause in contract for my clients. They care about quality not trendiness. Downvotes on your comment are telling me that this is the new JS topic. Oh no.... :)

I think there are plenty of things to knock cloud based SaaS tools for but quality is a weird one - there are plenty of high quality cloud based solutions that can deliver high quality outputs.

Sorry, my english is not polished enough to express my point of view properly. I will try again. When I talk about quality it is in context applied to servicing my clients. In context of UX/UI and graphical design. When using a traditionally licensed software I own a tool. I can do my professional work with this tool and make a profit. New features add extra functionality and if I have a business case for this new functionality I can invest. But in most of use cases I can do my work with previous version with base functionality. Life cycle of graphic software must be long. Thats why I use Affinty software for design and avoid Adobe products. I know what my ROI is. My software is not bloated with background web services and notifications.

There is a really useful free tier - I think the paid tier mostly includes collaboration features.

I had a recent experience with autodesk that shows that free tiers can disappear or be neutered after you've invested significant time and energy into them.

If you just owned that version of the software it would work forever instead you are at the mercy of the platform forever.

Caveat emptor

It's not just free tiers. Imagine the comments here in a decades time when Figma goes full Adobe and starts to squeeze every last drop of blood out of their customer base.

when the article about not being able to run adobe CS1/2 came up I nervously eyed my copy of CS6 from 2012...

Except some non-subscription software are still SaaS in disguise.

Take a look at Sketch. You can use a file on future versions...but up to a point. If you hit that limit, you will have to buy the upgrade.

I don't use sketch, so I don't know anything about it. It's mac only and while i have an ipad pro and an iphone, I don't own a mac and dont want one, and thats a mac only app.

I'm not sure why sketch would have the restrictions they have except that forever supporting old formats might be more expensive than they could justify.

Figma is free unless you need team functionality.

You need the team plan if you want to share a design tokens/components across projects, for example a color palette.