You’ve been misinformed. Adobe sells Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler (former Alchemy) for 20 USD per month. 40 USD subscription includes Stager, Modeler (when its been released) and more substance source assets. Also it should be noted that the development and improvement of these products does not stop under the wing of Adobe. Substance Designer now can generate 3d models, they developed a new displacement rendering algorithm that does not require mesh tessellation and, accordingly, requies much less video memory. In Substance Painter they added warp mode, anchors, geometry masks and so on. Stager and Modeler also shows great potential. If I had to choose between Maxon ZBrush and Adobe Zbrush. I would choose Adobe without hesitation. At least they price tag is reasonable and development is steady.