I'd say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the wrong tools for doing product flows. dot, omnigraffle or a sharpie are all better suited to the task. I guess if

I'd say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the wrong tools for doing product flows. dot, omnigraffle or a sharpie are all better suited to the task. I guess if you have some in-house artists using Photoshop they should have a copy, I guess. But they could probably get by with Paint.NET[1] on Windows. petercooper mentioned two good mac image editing programs. Inkscape[2] is very capable for vector graphics. Sure Paint.NET and Inkscape aren't as good as photoshop, but people are using them to make amazing art so. coffeenut/Locke1689 mentioned BizSpark, which includes MS expression studio. Really if you're working in a start up using Windows that isn't using BizSpark that's more than just a little odd. I find it a little hard to believe that Keynote and/or Powerpoint are necessary. OO.o Impress[3] works just fine for everything I've ever thrown at it, including shoehorning it into making posters. Even google docs presentations are generally sufficient. But I also don't use the typewriter animation with the sound effect. You mentioned Office, to which I would have two questions. The first being "Why?" And the second being "Why is OO.o inadequate?" I mean, are you writing .docx files, converting them to .doc, printing them to pdf, zipping them and then mailing them about for documentation? And even if you are, OpenOffice would probably work fine. It works especially well when you set the default to save as .doc/.docx (etc). Finally, if it makes you uncomfortable I think you have to bring it up. Not because it's evil or incompetent or anything, but because it clearly bothers you. If it bothers you, your work output will decrease, you'll hate working, start eating bacon mushroom bacon cheddar bacon burgers for lunch and dinner to make yourself feel better and then have a massive myocardial infarction. All because of a little software piracy. [1] http://www.getpaint.net/ http://www.getpaint.net/ [2] http://inkscape.org/ http://inkscape.org/ [3] http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html