In my current project, one of my aspirations is to use free or "cheap" software whenever possible. In the server side it is easy as Rails, Apache, Ubuntu etc. are open source and come with flexible no-charge licenses. For productive development you might have to buy some licenses, but usually don't need to spend much. For any serious developer, 50 euros or dollars should not be a problem for such a great product such as Textmate.

Exception to the rule is graphical design. There seems not to be decent, free or "cheap", solution for creating those mockups or giving tasty final per-pixel adjusted looks to your site. I know some people can cope with free solutions such as GIMP or you could create web graphics using Pixelmator, but when it comes to productivity, you really need helpers for grid layouts, tools for slicing and optimizing images for web. Icons and illustrations usually form up better with vector graphics and then you have even less choices.

De facto tools for web graphics come from Adobe family. Photoshop and Illustrator will certainly do the job, but they are pricy. If you are a web-UI developer and you spend most of the time with the products, any price tag should be fine. But if you are like me, no time nor capacity to become an ultimate UI designer, but still occasionally need to create decent looking graphics, you probably don't want to pay 2 000 euros for the software.

Fireworks is a little less known Adobe product, but some people argue it does everything you can with Photoshop and Illustrator. Not everything, but anything you need for web graphics. Adobe promotes Fireworks with the phrase "Rapidly prototype and design for the web", which gives an impression that you might need something like Photoshop for the "real thing". According to these blog posts, this is not the case, and I bought it. The price tag is not anything you could call cheap, but it certainly is affordable $300.

My first impressions of Fireworks are great. The insane part of the story is how Adobe rates the products in the two sides of Atlantic. Affordable $300 suddenly is €440 that is about 700 US dollars with today's exchange rate. People are naturally quite angry with Adobe, and some order Adobe products directly from USA. This is crazy, but Adobe is not likely to change the policy. And as long as we don't have those free or cheap alternatives, they probably don't have to.