This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif.
Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone else.
I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize
Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)
>No, your content in Affinity is not used to train AI-powered features, or to help AI features learn and improve in other ways, such as model evaluation or quality assurance. In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.
I've been using ByteDance's CapCut video editor that has this business model and I've been blown away by the top quality tool you get for free. It really doesn't feel scammy when they ask for money for fancy features that cost them extra GPU cycles to run the AI models.
Given that it’s the only thing keeping the US economy afloat right now? Then many of us are loosing our jobs, and no longer having access to drawing tools will matter little.
I think it depends on how it's used or integrated. Image generation and editing seems to be the of the more useful things. "Take outt the power lines from this photo." Etc.
I am unclear on the problem: are the apps, previously free, significantly more limited than their prior free versions unless/until you also purchase a subscription for the CanvaAI portions?
That aside, this isn’t a new thing for Canva, they aren’t chasing AI here, in this space GenAI is chasing the use case that Canva has been filling for a while, and incorporating genai as part of that is just, you know, “hey lots of people use this ai tool for design work now so maybe we add one because like it or not it’s how thing are”. Design is the Canva space, it’s not like they did a pivot to crypto.
To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.”
Keeping in mind that:
1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy)
2. Large ML models require a lot of resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!)
3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.)
Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster.
Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster.
Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable.
You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.)
Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.
> 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand
No, there’re not. People with influence or who have invested in the space say that these features are in demand/the next big thing. In reality, I haven’t seen a single user interview where the person actively wanted or was even excited about AI.
Photoshop now has a bunch of features that get used in professional environments. And in the end user space, facial recognition or magic eraser are features in apps like Google Photos that people actively use and like. People probably don't care that it's AI under the hood, in fact they probably don't even realize.
There is a lot of unchecked hype, but that doesn't mean there is no substance.
I didn't make any assertion about AI, only about "AI" (note the quotes in my GP comment) — i.e. the same old machine-learning-based features like super-resolution upscaling, patch-match, etc, that people have been adding to image-editing software for more than a decade now, but which now get branded as "AI" because people recognize them by this highly-saturated marketing term.
Few artists want generative-AI diffusion models in their paint program; but most artists appreciate "classical" ML-based tools and effects — many of which they might not even think of as being ML-based. Because, until recently, "classical ML" tools and effects have been things run client-side on the system, and so necessarily small and lightweight, only being shipped if they'll work on the lowest-common-denominator GPU (esp. "amount of VRAM") that artists might be using.
The interesting thing is that, due to the genAI craze, GPU training and inference clusters have been highly commoditized / brought into reach for the developers of these "classical ML" models. You don't need to invest in your own hyperscale on-prem GPU cluster to train models bigger than fit on a gaming PC any more. And this has led to increased interest in, and development of, larger "classical ML" models, because now they're not so tightly-bounded by running client-side on lowest-common-denominator hardware. They can instead throw (time on) a cloud GPU cluster to train their model; and then expect the downstream consumer of that model (= a company like Canva) to solve the problem of running the resulting model not by pushing back for something size-optimized to be run locally on user machines, but rather by standing up an model-inference-API backend running it on the same kind of GPU IaaS infra that was used to train it.
The image generation models have been super useful for anyone wanting to deliver any sort of production content for years. Ofc nobody _promotes_ that. Using ai images is like taking photos as reference for collages. Anyone with a subscription to an image bank is likely happy enough to minibanana some generic references.
> and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off.
Just release some simple free "test application" that checks whether the computer satisfies the system requirements and does something "simple" (but relevant for the user) so that the users want to try out this simple free test application and want to update their hardware so that it can run.
Now, after the users have been incentivized to update their hardware so that they can run the cool test application, you can upsell your users to the "full software experience". :-)
I'd buy some of these explinations, except the depth estimation, colorization, and super-resolution ML models they use in the app DO run locally and are still subscription-gated.
Apple has been doing on-device machine learning for portrait blurs and depth estimation for years now, though based on the UI, this might use cloud inference as well.
Granted, these aren't the super heavy ones like generative fill / editing, and I understand that cloud inference isn't cheap. A subscription for cloud-based ML features is something I'd find acceptable, and today that's what has launched... The real question is what they plan to do with this in 2-5 years. Will more non-"AI" features make their way into the pro tier? Only time will tell!
That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app.
The fact that the apps are now free, suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth.
---
Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one reflecting a much more aware/cynical take on how the software market works in 2025.
Adobe essentially charges a continuing fee just to continue to run the software they coded and shipped to you, on your own computer — regardless of whether you even care about any further software updates. (Sure, the subscription pays for other things, like Adobe Bridge cloud storage and so forth, but if you don't pay the subscription, you don't even get to just run the apps.)
But this also means that people quite often crack Adobe's apps — because there's something there of value to run on your own computer, if you just strip off the DRM.
Canva here are taking a much more pragmatic approach:
• Anything that is given to the user to run is free, because ultimately, if you charged for it, people would just crack it. They aren't bothering with DRM or even trying to treat the app itself as a revenue stream. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Especially if you're not in a market position where you think you can win the big enterprise customers over from Adobe.
• Anything that is run on your backend is charged for. Because users can't force your cloud services to do anything without a subscription. There's no "cracking" a cloud service.
• But also, crucially — if a feature is a "fake cloud" feature, where it could be "pulled down from the cloud" back into the client by writing a compatible implementation of the server backend that does some simple thing, and patching the software to speak to that server (either over the Internet, or to a local-on-the-machine background service that ships with the patch) — then users will do that. So you can only really charge for features that can't be "pulled down" in this way. Like, for example, features relying on some kind of secret-sauce ML model that you never expose to the client.
(And that last bit actually makes me less wary of their approach here: it suggests that they likely won't be charging for anything other than inherently "cloudy" features: these large-ML-model-driven features, cloud storage/collaboration features, etc. Which might mean that non-"cloudy" features get ignored... but likely not. For the same reason that Apple doesn't ignore macOS/iOS features in favor of iCloud features: new users won't be interested switching to the platform [and then potentially subscribing] if the base platform itself isn't competitive / doesn't serve their needs.)
Pricing in most businesses has little relation to the cost of developing and making the product. Most businesses price relative to the value that their product delivers to the customer. If there is robust competition, then the price is often driven down towards the cost, but it's not driven by the cost. In Adobe's case, they see that there is an entire industry of creative people using their products as their primary tool(s). Those employees are often paid well, with salaries from 50k-100k per year as common. Is it not reasonable (from Adobe's perspective) that employers pay 1/50th of the employee's salary for their primary and most useful tool? No one complains when the plumber requires a work truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools.
The price ceiling has little relation to cost, sure. But COGS sets an effective price floor — you'll be revenue-negative unless you do the math to ensure you're charging customers (especially your largest customers) at least COGS. COGS is the most critical number your enterprise salespeople will ask you for in order to backstop their negotiations.
For some companies, COGS and customer LTV are numbers with such different orders of magnitude that they don't even have to think about the COGS side.
But "software you charge a one-time fee for" generally produces a very low customer LTV; and "renting compute on someone else's GPU IaaS" generally produces a very high (customer-lifetime-integrated) COGS; so if they were sticking to the "just charge for the software" model, "COGS rising faster than CLTV" would be a direct threat to their business model. Which is... why they don't want to do that.
It's been a long time since I looked into it, but is pirating Adobe's products viable these days? I thought it was pretty much impossible, and the last piratable release is quite old.
I worked at Serif during the early years of their pivot from boxed desktop software in C++ for Windows to an internet company making modern design software. It was a nice place to work, had some good friends there. Been interesting watching their journey.
I got the impression there was a disconnect between product and eng teams based on quite a few spicy responses from Serif on the forums. Was that the case?
Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
I am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version.
This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades.
I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.
Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing:
Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans
And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans:
Are AI features available?
Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity.
Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan?
No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts.
Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.
Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top.
If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
It is a freemium model, but they are doing it in the proper way. I’m a bit worried this could lead to enshittification down the road, but for now I’m glad they’re doing this, will definitely give it another try, and might throw in a few bucks even. (Especially if they reconstider their stance on Linux support!)
Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.
Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.
Offering it for free is likely to increase their user base significantly, which in turn will increase the number of people who end up paying for the AI features.
It's functionally identical to the software registration requirement of previous Affinity software releases, except that instead of verifying a registration number, it's now verifying a (currently) free Canva account credential.
It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too).
Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
> Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
It’s interesting that none of the independent tools survive for long. I wonder if Adobe Illustrator is so dominant that there is little room left for the competitors.
Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license.
In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it.
Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.
It sounds like you're positioning this as a counter to the post you're replying to, but I think that is actually what they're complaining about.
> you only pay if you want Canva AI features
Right, so what they've done is tied their business model as a product to AI features and nothing else. That's not "oh good, I can use it for free", it's "oh no, they are no longer incentivised to care about the parts of the product I wanted".
the ai bubble has already popped!!! the biggest tech companies on the planet who are spending insane amounts of capex on “ai” keep reporting insane earnings reports one after another, things are popping left & right
I realize that money rules everything but I find it so confusing that so many companies will spend a decade building a great product and then just exit with full knowledge that it will be the inevitable end of the relevance of their work.
You might think that some founders somewhere out there would be motivated by some level of ego to say “no, I won’t sell out, I built this amazing thing and the highest bidder owner will milk it dry.”
But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.
You can remain in control and continue to make good quality software, but that means staying small, very small, like a handful of people small. There are numerous software providers like that still making niche software.
Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).
It may or may not work out. Once you are not actively involved, its not per your vision anymore anyway. And at the end of the day, if you don't think e.g. in this case its very hard compete with Adobe and I really don't want to risk my payday, you'll sell it and move on to do whatever next you want to do.
If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
It's more complicated than that. Sometimes after 15 years, the founders want to move on and do something else. Or they want to build a dream house. Or their cofounder wants to get out. Or they hear the long-term vision of the acquiring company, and want to be a part of it.
Although it's an uphill battle, not every acquisition ends with the product being destroyed. Just look at what Apple did with NeXT and PA Semi…
You can have controlling stake in a company without working there day to day.
Apple literally destroyed those companies. After Apple acquired NeXT there was one less operating system on the market. PA Semi now doesn’t have a product that is sold to the open market.
Because it’s not inevitable. I know it’s the fashion on HN to say it’s inevitable, but it’s not, and if it were, then it would be inevitable for all companies, including those who didn’t exit, which would mean those companies would fold, which would make it a capitalism problem, not a “founders exit” problem.
Either way, trying to place blame on individual people is kind of silly.
Maybe not inevitable but “most likely outcome by far.”
It’s not like your median founder hasn’t heard of enshittification. They just don’t care. They’re by and large out for a quick buck, not much different than a day trader or a gambler. And the VC system enables that rather than being focused on building companies that are generational and customer focused.
How much of this is just getting a skewed view because you don't typically hear about the acquisitions that don't happen?
Beyond that, overcoming bias is really hard. An acquirer is probably going to talk a good game about how the acquisition is going to benefit the product and the customers from more resources, better integration, etc. Hearing that, we know it's probably BS, or sincere but incorrect. But when an eight or nine figure pile of money is on the line, you have a very strong subconscious motivation to believe it.
Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)
To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.
- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.
- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
> Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
How? First, by that time, you've usually spent many times more than it would have cost you to own the software outright, so the vendor is already better off. Second, if you stop paying, you lose access to the software, possibly with no other way to open existing files, etc. You're the one who's being held hostage - not the vendor.
As a hobbyist, I shudder to think that my total annual bill would be if all the software I use every now and then had a subscription model. It would be well in excess of $5,000/year.
Sure, if the subscription is unreasonably priced. Then yes, it will be unreasonable.
Final Cut Pro is a $300 piece of software with a $50/yr or $5/mo subscription. It would take you 6 years to reach the same price which shows the subscription cost is reasonable.
It's a separate issue when software is unreasonably priced in subscription mode, versus the merits of the subscription model itself.
All of my photos are stored in a big Lightroom database. If I wasn't using an old camera supported by Lightroom 5 (that I bought outright in 2011), and was using modern Lightroom instead, I would have to pay an ongoing cost just to maintain access to my photo database, in perpetuity.
This sucks no matter how much the subscription actually is right now. Losing access to all your old work in its original format if you don't pay a subscription to a company that might decide to do anything, up to and including shutting down the servers and killing the app? No thank you.
Yeah, Lightroom 5 hasn't had any updates, doesn't support any new cameras, etc. But it still works, I can still look at all the photos I took with my old camera, and all my edits, and this will work, for free, until Lightroom 5 bitrots away into not working on Windows 14 or whatever.
It sucks that I can't just buy a new version of Lightroom when I get a new camera, instead I'd have to jump ship or sell my soul to Adobe.
I understand what you're saying, and yeah, that does suck.
> Losing access to all your old work in its original format
Most photo editing apps retain your originals, even when they're in a database. For example, Apple Photos has a folder full of originals with no modifications. Does Lightroom not have this?
I understand that there is a lot of metadata that you also want, I'm just curious about this detail?
My beef isn't with products where you have a choice between perpetual and monthly. It's with products where you don't. This includes the "always-online freemium" model, where you only really lose features over time to drive free -> paid migration and show growth.
Subscriptions often don’t allow continuing use of even existing versions of the product after you stop paying - it’s not just about access to future updates.
The main exceptions are subscriptions that are explicitly for support and maintenance contracts on top of a perpetual license. There are also a few unusual business models, like JetBrains offer for subscriptions that last at least 12 months which grants a perpetual fallback license of the major versions (including future minor versions) that were current during any part of the subscription up through 12 months before cancellation.
There is a big difference between buying a perpetual licence with extra yearly support packages versus leasing the software with on a subscription model. While the two options may appear to be the same thing, the first one doesn't remove your ability to run the software once you stop paying for support.
The best way that I have to describe it is in the first option you're buying a version of the software and then paying for updates and bug fixes in a flexible manner, while in the second option you're leasing use of the software for as long as you continue to pay.
You can't have your cake (one time payments) and eat it too (software gets perpetual updates).
Perpetual licenses with 1 year of updates is a good middle ground, but they have said that the v2 suite will get maintenance updates for some period of time so even that type of license would not have changed this conversation.
Except that you can, because every software company did this for decades… Want to upgrade to a new version of our product? That’s another one time fee for that version.
If you squint, this looks a lot like a subscription model, but with extra steps. Why it’s different is because those extra steps actually matter.
They matter to the people who aren’t subjected to subscription dark-patterns to keep them from unsubscribing for just a little bit longer. They matter to the product, development, and sales teams who know they actually have to produce and deliver something meaningful if they want repeat customers. The matter to the accounting teams on all sides of the transaction, in particular because subscription revenue or expenses can always be counted as “recurring” and this has implications on cash flow which itself can impact many things.
The pitch has always been “we grow with you, this is a win-win”, implying that perpetual license fees are actually good for you to pay. Ostensibly because keeping your supplier in business keeps you in business, but in reality it was totally possible for a software supplier to go out of business and for their customers to continue operating without issue for 5, 10, even 15+ years, before even considering finding a replacement software.
And despite the pitch seeming so sweet, the literature on why you want your software business to operate on a subscription model was always about gaining an advantage over your customers, however marginal it may be, and now the data has borne out that the advantage is stark.
I think people want either (a) a subscription that lets them keep the latest version perpetually, or (b) a perpetual license that provides some predictable amount of updates (this could be zero).
What people don't want is to pay for updates that they were led to believe they would get, but that they never got. Or to lose access to software that they paid a lot for, or that they got locked into (even free).
I don't think these are particularly difficult expectations to understand or meet.
> That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
You also lose the ability to access your data in a lot of cases. That's the problem. I also own a v1 and v2 license for the Affinity stuff. I've used it to design myself exactly one logo, so I would have been way better off subscribing to Adobe's stuff for a month, right?
Wrong, at least in my opinion. The problem with subscriptions is that you lose control over future access to your data. For my logo, I'm fine with Affinity Designer v2 never getting updated as long as I can load the software and use it as-is.
I recently loaded up an abandoned Java project that I haven't looked at in a dozen years. I use IntelliJ IDEA and it wouldn't load in the most recent version of IDEA because the Gradle version used in the project was too old. I fired up my self-hosted server that I used at the time, installed IDEA v8, added a hostname for the Sonatype Nexus server to my DNS, and loaded my old project to look around.
You can barely do that anymore because you don't own or control anything. Everything is subscription based, pay forever, with deep links to infrastructure you don't control either. I can mostly do it because I refuse to get on the subscription "never control anything" bandwagon, but I'll still probably get burned by online activation at some point.
Just wait until everyone has 2 decades of AI context locked away behind paywalls controlled by a handful of companies. Everything in existence will be vendor locked and those companies will usurp every novel idea anyone is naive enough to feed in as context.
> the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it
There's a plague of this on the entire industry now. Free apps abound, none of them will do exactly what you need, all of them will point you to the shiny unfree thing that will.
If you get value out of the free part of a tool, great! If not, then you get to choose to pay for the rest or not. Personally I'm happy that it tends to be the feature set I can live without that costs money. Not always, but often enough.
It's not even close. This is more akin to shareware where Bill Gates shows up at your house to collect a payment every month and formats your hard drive if you don't cough up the money.
Shareware gave you a perpetual license and control that couldn't be taken away, especially before the internet.
There is a big difference between a one time payment and a recurring payment, especially if the company canceling the product or going out of business means you can no longer use the tool, and I honestly steer clear of those in most cases.
Yes, that's the situation at launch. The fear that's expressed above is that the subscription model incentivizes pushing people towards it as hard as possible. It's the exact opposite of Serif's straightforward model from before. Get ready for most new features (including ones that are unrelated to AI) to become locked to the subscription model. When they think they're not getting enough out of Affinity, they may also start cutting core functionality to force people to subscribe. Maybe, a limit on how many documents you can edit at once, or a layer limit (for the photo part), or an object limit (for the vector/"designer" part). This is how all of these subscriptions go nowadays.
>You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features
And if Canva decides that "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further,"[0] what will you do then? Go and rent the Adobe subscription suite instead?
The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.
I'm sad (buyer of both v1 and v2). Being a paid app as opposed to require a subscription was the main selling over the Adobe Suite. A lot of users migrated to Affinity for that reason. As the free version will get more and more crippled as they move to pushing subscriptions, why not switch back to Adobe?
I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.
I’m kinda keen on this. A few months ago I was looking at making a one time magazine print, but I discovered there were essentially no affordable options. The affinity option was the cheapest one, but still unaffordable for a one time
project.
I don’t even mind paying a subscription but the adobe option requires you to get a minimum of 12 months.
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates."
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
yeah I liked it too but then, I realize how little I pay for this type of software vs how much I pay for subscription for services that I honestly barely use.
financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly. People vote with their wallets, and they vote subscription.
It's sad, I loooooved Affinity and their licensing schemes, but honestly... I can see why they are moving.
The AI stuff though makes no sense to me? How many people will actually use it? But then I am mostly programmer and I use these tools only time to time.
This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.
In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.
In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.
> indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model
The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.
No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.
If the competition is making more money on subscriptions, they can hire more people to improve the product, ultimately beating the non subscription options.
> In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting.
I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.
Free software is dead? Free software is still there, same as it ever was. And it will be there forever. The more people flee to it from SAAS shittification, the better it will get.
If you take 10-15 minutes to customize the UI it can be pretty damn simple if you want. I'd say those minutes are worth it to avoid a subscription and to support a true OSS stalwart project.
Gimp, maybe not so much[1], but I understand that Krita has improved quite a bit. And regardless of stagnancy, both of these applications will continue to exist long after Affinity gets our-incredible-journeyed.
[1]: (FWIW, I don't know one way or the other. Apologies to any Gimp developers here.)
Gimp actually, finally had their big 3.0 update earlier this year which "modernized" (to ~5 years ago) a lot of the codebase. The UI is mostly the same but it's using much more modern UI components (editing text isn't terrible now, etc.)
Gimp's problem is mostly one of funding and attention, like most OSS projects. But it's never stopped development, which I think is impressive 27 years on.
Imagine where Gimp would be if any company treated it like Valve treats WINE.
Okay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
Yeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now).
Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
> . V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
How does it becomes useless?
Until there is a new format that you absolutely can't avoid on your day to day life there is no reason you cannot use it the same way you have used it until now.
I've been thinking about this lately. It's really difficult to understand where your dependencies are with modern software.
I might built myself a full blown piracy machine that never gets to access the internet so I have access to an environment that can't get taken away. At the very least, it'll be a good way to learn how much dependence there is on internet connectivity, which we all know the answer to - way too much.
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.
Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.
Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
Useless? My guy, it’s a photo editing program. You don’t constantly need the new hotness. They don’t break old versions of their files every update like Substance Painter. I bought v2 more because I support Affinity not because I needed new features.
It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software, and png, jpeg and standard camera raw formats aren’t going away.
Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.
Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.
> but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.
For it to be a problem you need to actually buy said new cameras and lenses.
I am still using my Pentax K5 II and Samsung NX from a bit more than a decade ago (as well as some analog cams but I disgress).
There is a lot of FOMO + Gear Aquisition Syndrome to make that a problem. Maybe one should focus more on actually having a life,using the products they akready own, make arts or memories instead of thinking what is new on the market they are missing out and what to buy next.
Makes me think of those people, perfectly happy with Airpod pro v2 who purchase v3 ones, only to end up frustrated by their new purchase.
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
Very true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”
If you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.
Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely.
Of course, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.
This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.
This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.
Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.
I hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.
Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)
Smart objects and smart filters were present in early CS versions I think. CS5/CS6 had them for sure, though I don't doubt that new filters and features have been added in CC.
The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.
Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.
Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.
I primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.
Any type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.
I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.
And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.
And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
Is it really?
People on HN are always talking about how they use pre-Creative Cloud versions of Adobe products years and years later.
My firewall already blocks Affinity programs from accessing the internet without my permission. I guess I'll set it to an automatic deny so I don't lose any features, or have to deal with any nagging.
People on HN also tend to use Apple hardware so it's no surprise that for them unmaintained software is dead software, because it will likely break 2 or 3 macOS versions from now.
I feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.
> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year
It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.
I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
I paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.
still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).
It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.
nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
What a fascinating thread. I bought Affinity Photo and Designer V1 as one-time purchases a few years ago. I didn't upgrade to V2 when those came out. I have continued to occasionally use the V1 apps - I was just in Photo the other day.
To me this is exactly why you would want to buy software licenses as one-time purchases - the company can't rug pull you for what you already bought. If I want, I can keep using the Affinity apps on this machine indefinitely.
It seems a lot of people are really frustrated that they purchased software and now the company is doing something else. Isn't the whole point of purchasing a license for standalone software that you are protected in case the company goes under, or gets bought, or decides to do something else?
Do people think the apps they bought are going away? Or did they expect to get free updates forever for their one-time purchase? Or am I missing something in this announcement?
You answered your own question. Buying a perpetual license ensures the company can’t rug pull you. Not having the option for a perpetual license gives no guarantees of the sort. One of Serif’s top selling points was the perpetual license, and people were rightfully nervous about the Canva acquisition. They even made it a huge point in their announcement to reassure people who were nervous about the perpetual license model going away.
A perpetual license does not entitle me to anything beyond the scope of the license, of course. It’s great that I can use V2 for as long as it serves my needs. But now, when someone new is looking for graphic design software, or if I find am missing some good features in V1 or V2 that get added to the new software, of course I will be upset that I no longer have the option to upgrade to or recommend the non-rug-pullable option.
I feel like it’s not unreasonable to have a negative opinion towards the decisions companies make that further the enshittification of the professional software world.
It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license).
But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model.
I think their bet is enough people will want the AI, which I think is correct.
As a long time Affinity user, first reaction was: "see, there is the subscription", but on second thought, fair enough, well played. I'll probably get the AI subscription as well.
I do wonder if over time more features will go into that premium plan, but we'll see.
Edit: It seems like some of the AI stuff runs on device, they are not very clear about what does or doesn't. That makes me change my opinion a bit, as that's just straight up a freemium subscription model.
I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal your shit for "AI training."
Hell, has anyone looked at the EULA for this "free" product? Maybe it's already doing that.
This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.
Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).
> This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
In my experience, senior sales/revenue/whatever leaders see the free version as competing with the sales motion, not as a funnel (regardless of the reality). And argue to limit it more and more for short term conversion improvements.
I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was. Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remaining tools, there is no one left with "selling desktop design applications" as a business model. That seems long-term unsustainable if your interest is "desktop design applications" that do their jobs well with few upsells to long-term subscriptions. The unsustainability that leads to upsells and subscription paywalls only generally ever get worse over time, because users of the free part aren't the desired customer.
On the plus side, when they layoff every single person that worked on Affinity in order to better align with something something market strategy, those people will be able to get together and start a new non-subscription desktop design applications company... with blackjack... and hookers.
I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.
Today's Corel seems very much a "use at your own security/bug risk" license-selling factory. They still sell support contracts (because those are lucrative) and sometimes patch the software for big security issues, but they seem to do that on a staff that is far more salespeople and lawyers (to wrangle ancient B2B legal contracts and new "minimal effort" security support contracts) than software developers. Their business model doesn't seem to be as much "selling desktop software" as it seems to be "fulfilling old support contracts for the zombies of classic desktop software".
That said, yes, maybe PSP and CorelDraw will solve some uses of parts of Affinity's stack for people looking for an alternative and don't mind paying close to full price for code that is mostly frozen in time from the late 90s and early 00s.
Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.
They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.
So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
It looks like it is an offline application (after license verification) in he FAQ
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
As a long time Adobe "user" (read: hater) I'm curious if this decision targets Adobe or Microsoft options more..? Maybe both.
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
Until you get a 2am e-mail stating that they've updated their terms of service, and by reading the e-mail, you have agreed to the updated terms because the chances of you challenging this in court are precisely zero, no matter what the internet IANALs say.
No. Because it's part of the cost for Black Magic Design that if they want to have their own hardware and not have the industry's monopolists (Adobe and Apple) make it difficult to maximise their sales, they need to control their own app.
This is what Canva think about their asset marketplace and AI tools, I guess. They need their own app to make sure Adobe can never so much as tug at the corner of the rug.
Free is not unsustainable if there is a paid tier.
For people like you who only use it occasionally, you're not the kind of person who's going to pay in the first place.
It's sustainable if the professionals people who use it daily/weekly find it's worth it to pay for the AI tools. And if you're a professional, you'll likely be needing those AI tools to keep up.
Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
It’s not just the case of badly written software. It will work until they shut off the license servers.
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.
This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.
I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.
It's smart only if their business goal is to lose every single customer they had specifically because it wasn't subscription software and didn't have the AI junk that their customers specifically did not want.
I have a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (I was a long-time, early employee and negotiated this as a perk). One reason I paid for and use Affinity is that it DOESN'T have AI. I want to be completely sure the photos I edit don't go up to a "cloud" somewhere, etc.
I feel like everyone is very negative about something that hasn't happened yet. This gives a desktop environment to Canva users, where the revenue actually is. It's both a trojan horse and a usable product.
Will everyone's worse fears come true? Maybe, maybe not. Mean time you have an excellent app, for free, and very few software products, free, open source, closed source, perpetual, subscription.... last "forever". They are often obsoleted by some new product, new workflow or just a new OS. Take it for what it is right now.
The new version is a nice update over v2, with some great new features.
The downside is that some useful features like background removal will never come to the non-subscription version. OTOH, the subscription is cheap if you think of it as license cost for an Adobe alternative.
After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer.
C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)...
Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for everyone else to stop moaning]
Version 2 has been fine. FWIW though, I don't use Affinity Photo (but bought it too because I like the company). I'm Pixelmator Pro when it comes to pixels (but love Affinity Designer and Publisher).
V1 felt polished to a degree that implied the developers had thought a lot about how their product should provide a compelling user experience. It was also very performant and rarely crashed.
V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).
Awesome, expected Canva were going to jack up the prices or turn it into a subscription after acquisition. A freemium version is very welcome for the rare times I need to use it. No plans to ever be a paying customer myself (sorry Canva), but nice to know it's still being actively developed.
Just noticed the AI feature integrations are locked behind a premium sub, makes sense to go for a wide funnel with a premium free product then up-sell to people who want the AI integration, should turn out to be commercially successful.
Really hoping a Linux version is in the works. Hopefully the exodus from Windows picks up so we can accelerate the timeline for Linux support. (Currently using the amazing https://photopea.com for most image edits on Linux)
It’s not all free. It gets you in the door to then pay for the subscription to the AI features.
Also, that idea of “if you don’t pay, you’re the product” was a nice slogan but it isn’t true. Open-source software is free and respects you, while streaming services these days charge you money while serving you ads.
The open-source comparison is confused. Lots of open-source projects do offer optional commercial licenses or support contracts. And the truly free-as-in-beer projects either have some kind of grant financing or else the maintainer shoulders the costs until they burn out.
Free makes business sense when monetizing through business customers and AI subscriptions.
Conflating "this doesn't align with my preferences" with "this is objectively bad business strategy" assumes personal consumer expectations should dictate corporate viability. Those are different frames of reference.
Does this read in ToS somewhere? I know many professional artists and if they would find out that their work is used for training, the app is uninstalled faster than it takes time for you to read this text.
It requires a Canva login now, so they'll smuggle it in through there. If it not already in the language it's inevitable because it's set up for enshittification now.
It says, on the actual website, the absolute opposite:
"Your content in Affinity isn’t used to train AI features — we can’t access local files. For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control. You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
The only nuance I can think of here is that if you are using the cloud AI tools, you are uploading content. But it's largely hypocritical to complain about AI tools being trained on your content. They were trained on everyone else's.
Professionals I know don't want to use AI at all. So if Affinity is really not using the produced art for training, many artists will get a good tool for free.
> For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control.
IE: You're in control of what you upload. What happens after it's on their servers? What happens when they send it to a partner for processing?
The AI industry is filled with liars. It's basically "we're not using you data for training, that was a partner we pay that trained using your data." Good luck finding out who actually used your data for training when more than one company had access to it.
No, by "you're in control" they don't just mean that the control is whether or not you upload it. You've elided the other bit of that quote: "You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
They mean there are two privacy toggles that control it. They ask, you can change your answer.
> AI-powered features can learn and improve with your general usage
> When this setting is on, Canva and our trusted partners will use information about your general usage to help AI-powered features learn and improve. This includes how you interact and create with Canva products, but not your content.
> AI-powered features can learn and improve with your content
> We want to develop better AI features to help improve the way you create it in Canva. We have strict controls and policies in place to protect yours and your Team’s content when building AI, but we still won’t use it without your consent.
Beyond these, I don't know. Or really care, since I won't be using those tools.
That depends on whether they have anything to sell you. Like Da Vinci Resolve's free version, for example; they have something pro to sell you (and hardware).
Is it? It's just saying I presume it. Is there another word that I can use that does less heavy lifting? Or did you just say that because it's the done thing to say?
I get this every single year. Just go on to their web site, call up a human agent on their chat and tell them it's too expensive. They have a ton of offers to get it back down to what you were paying before.
One of the reasons I stopped doing photography was that I realized I’m locked to using Lightroom where all my previous pictures are, and without a subscription it’s such a hassle to gain access to them again. I miss the days when I just bought Lightroom and that was it. :-(
One of the last 2 pieces of perpetual license pieces of photo software I have left. This software segment has almost entirely been consumed by subscriptions.
Yes but settings for any existing photos are non-transferable between different RAW editing systems, by design. Even different versions of the same software have to keep around all old code for compatibility.
I looove the fact that we can now seamlessly switch between the Photo, Designer, and Publisher modalities within a single program.
One of the great things about using the Affinity suite for the last few years has been the consistency of design conventions and key commands across all three programs, so of course it makes sense to merge them all!
Whereas Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign all have inherited different commands and conventions from their independent developments and are incongruent.
I'm so impressed by the workflow now. This feels like a tremendous win from a workflow standpoint.
Yeah I get the feeling everyone is talking about the AI stuff, but the majority of the launch talks about the actual _software_ they’re launching, and I really like it.
I’m happy for AI subscribers to subsidise my experience ;)
I was very surprised by this move, because the whole lingo while they were teasing it was giving me much worse vibes than what this ended up being about.
I paid for V1, paid again after they released V2 even though I was on Linux which they didn't support. I did it mostly out of support, and also because the community was making strides to get a decent wine setup working, so I would eventually get back to using it if I ever felt like it.
More diversity in creative software is always nice to have, and it's good to keep challenging the idea that "Adobe is dominant because it's the best solution". Tho I don't feel like Canva is quite the player I'd be rooting for either.
Fortunately, they seem to be handling the existing lifetime licenses a lot better than Autograph did when it got acquired by Maxon.
Overall I think I'm rooting for them. Good luck Affinity!
I must say this is a welcome relief from the overpriced Adobe monopoly which I, as a solo dev, simply can no longer justify.
The last suite with this name had a terrible UI. Canva also owns Leonardo which is pretty great so perhaps this will have a decent UI now that they've bought and revamped it.
Using this free desktop app requires Canva sign-in, ok fine, I can stomach that, it's free after all.
Signing in launches a browser to complete the sign-in process, but on macOS it launches Safari, not my OS default browser – this takes extra work to do over just using the `openUrl` call on macOS. Safari is blocked.
Thankfully something on my system redirects the URL opening to pass it to my orgs enforced browser, I sign-in, and then nothing happens. The page says it has launched Affinity, but Affinity is sitting there doing nothing waiting for me to log in.
I realise I'm on a somewhat non-standard setup, but an OAuth login flow is not hard to get right. I've built dozens of these flows in my career and messing it up this much is hard.
Edit:
> To report a bug within the application, click the "?" button in the top-right corner of the workspace. From the panel, select "Report a Bug".
This menu is not accessible until you have signed in. No other method of bug reporting is provided.
Haven't seen anything on Graphite.rs (site is still suggesting Q4 2025) but people on the Affinity Discord have been putting a lot of disgruntled new eyes on it.
Most of Blender's icons are actually made in Penpot which is also what the Blender foundation uses for UI prototyping. The brush icons are made in Blender though!
Unfortunately there is no realistic vector drawing open source app for MacOS. Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag. LibreDraw is ok for very basic things. But that's about it.
Same here.. I don't use it often, but it is fairly quick on my M2. It did have some mouse focus issues, you have to click around a bit more but that's okay-ish.
You can try Inkscape on Windows! It's the most crashy software I've used. It's crazy because I use Houdini and Blender, both far more complicated apps than Inkscape and they crash less.
(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)
Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.
I'm going to hold on my Affinity as long as I can and try to integrate as much of my workflow to Inkscape as possible (even if UI feels like CorelDraw). Also keeping eye on: https://graphite.rs/
For context: I own licenses for both Affinity Designer, and the full Affinity 2 suite.
Just tried the new affinity application for a couple hours and it's pretty great. Personas are now studios and as far as I can tell features from all apps are now integrated into one.
Giving this away for free is insane value and I am very glad to have this as a photoshop alternative.
It seems that the Affinity apps are removed from the Mac App Store? That would be a shame, because they are sandboxed. I don't want yet another app with unfettered access. Of course, I can still download them from my purchases, but I think there will be no updates anymore?
Yeah, I used to use the app store version of Slack because it was sandboxed. (I later switched to having Safari run it as a web application.) Even if I trusted them, the sandbox would be a layer of protection against bugs.
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
Been curious what the Oct 10 announcement would be. It seemed most likely an acquisition since they wanted enough time of not selling existing products to avoid dealing with a month of refunds. Appears Canva bought with it now being a single app that is "free" but paid for premium features. While many may rejoice at a solid free options it's certainly an unfortunate day for those who rely on it. As Canva makes money on people using the paid version so attention will be at making that version more enticing over time and free less. If people all just used the free and not the premium for AI, then they would either start charging for the "free" version or take away features from the free version to make the "choice" easier to upgrade. All in all good for Canva, and good for more casual users who can jump ship any time to free options but would be quite worrisome for those who have looked towards Affinity as the alternative to Adobe.
Yep, but dont expect the level of quality development that was there before. These'free' tools are to attract you to buy ai. They are now only selling tools. Serif were pushing to beat Adobe at their own game and make the best designer tools available. Canva are just trying to sell you ai.
Interesting. Yes, the pro features seem to be just about ai these days. I used affinity’s indesign equivalent while at work and it was quite good. I wonder what the business model is? Same as figma a while back?
This is a sad day, but it was obvious something horrible would happen, since they had pulled the products with zero communication, such a user hostile move to remove products for a month.
“Even if you are paying, you are the premium product.”
I think we need to stop saying that quote since the existence of subscription. Can you stop Google from tracking you or let you define your “algorithm” if you have purchased YouTube Premium and one of the Google Drive plans? I really doubt.
I think it is the value of the company matters. If their intentions is to keep investors happy, the users are always the product no matter paying or not. By contrast, there are quite a lot of free open source software doing the same for free, but the users still remain user.
There is a premium plan for the AI features, so that's the strategy, which does make some sense, I bet a lot of people will want to have those features.
Good software is never freemium. It is either paid upfront or it is a timebomb. I am okay with keeping things proprietary and asking for a fair price. Once free-to-play is introduced, the software is gone for good.
I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it
I hope the older versions (V2) will be maintained for a while… I can't help but worry about the upcoming ensh*ttification — I think it's inevitable that some day some exec at this now large company will come up with innovative ideas for "monetizing those free users" and things will go down the drain as usual.
I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
Mixed feelings about this. The apps were great and it's always uncomfortable when the future becomes uncertain due to a big acquisition. So far, it seems it could've gone worse. Their business model makes sense. I like that everything got integrated now, because Photo, Designer and Publisher being separate with so much overlap didn't feel natural. Hate the new logo, though... Some elegance was definitely lost.
It is a replacement, the old Affinity apps are discontinued:
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates.
"For the best experience, we recommend using the new Affinity by Canva app."
I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.
I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).
Well, that's annoying as I bought a licence about 6 months ago.
They've missed a trick so far not making a Linux version. People have been crying out for ages that Adobe never made a Linux version of Photoshop, and with the whole Windows 11 debacle now and people shifting over it would make perfect sense.
I don't understand this thread at all. I think this is the first time I have seen a thread that talks about something requiring a new account be created at some company, and a nonsensical major change to a product (merging the products into one, optional subscriptions) where the majority of people seem to be saying "thats ok and good luck" to the company. Worse, people who are upset this has happened to software they liked are getting downvoted. These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
It feels like the thread is being astroturfed.
They removed our software that we paid for from the Mac Store, and everyone is just like "thats fine, good move canva". Serif did a great job of keeping their software working through macOS major version updates. It's another reason many of us paid for their software. That's gone, and people are just cheering them on. It's very confusing.
- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?
- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)
- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)
For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.
I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.
> These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
Have you used it yet? It's a very elegant implementation. I, for one, am very excited about the workflow advantages of being able to easily switch between all three modalities with a click.
I'm feeling some real hurt seeing this announcement.
I bought the Affinity v1 apps, buying into the vision for a no-BS forever app.
I was surprised to see a v2 app show up a year after I bought into v1 with what I remember was something like a 25% discount. But this was going to be the new forever app, and I understand wanting to get things right on a second pass.
Reading about how v2 will no longer get updates just makes me see red.
Well this puts them on my blacklist. And I am an educator in precisely the artschool they would profit off catering to.
I refuse to teach my student tools that change the contract once you bought into them.
Adobe is on that list too.
The only major non-open source software that isn't is anything by Black Magic or Steam, both companies that have found healthy sustainable business models and jave acted reliable towards creaters and the open source community they relied on in their humbe beginnings.
Arf, and me who was hitting that "update later button", now I wish I had updated to the latest version before the removal from the store.
That said, I'll try this when it will become necessary. Affinity tools were great. I downloaded the new Canva version, and although I'm not a fan of the new icons and general look and feel it seems okay. It feels a bit less responsive than the v2, that might be fixed with some "bug fixes & small improvements" releases. I might be just jaded and resigned.
This is bad news...
I liked the Publisher/Designer/Photo apps on my Mac.
The presentation of this new 'Canva' acquired product feels like a circus, and roadmap is very unclear also.
This feels like it will be the end of a none adobe solution.
Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.
That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.
Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible
In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.
I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.
There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.
And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.
Circus? And why do you think you payed for nothing?
Looks like they unified Designer/Photo/Publisher into one app, will take a bit to to get used to, but overall nice, the split between Photo & Designer was always a bit silly I feel. Also added GenAI features, for $12/m, not in a hurry to subscribe atm, but could come in handy. Cool to see the suite is still alive and getting updates.
I can understand your confusion – possible anger - with my remark.
But you take my answer too literally.
I paid for it without regret, because I liked the software.
But now it feels as a dead end so all those efforts for nothing... in the end it is a waste of both time investment and money.
Cheers.
Nothing is free. I think we've all learned that by now. AI issues aside, think about the data you're locking forever when switching to Affinity. As much as we all hate Adobe, their formats are at least reverse-engineered and their specs published. With Canva's new free toy, you don't get that luxury. All of your work and data are basically locked forever in their proprietary format that no open-source software can read. So it's really up to Canva to decide for how long you get to play for free and under what rules.
IF the new app truly has all the features of V1 and V2 of the affinity apps. And IF it's truly free. Would it would damn sure be nice of them remove the license requirement from the V1 and V2 versions which I both bought and loved. And let users continue to enjoy these pieces of software for years to come without having to sign up for this new program which I don't trust at all.
I've used and loved it for close to 10 years now. And it's fantastic software. But I just can't trust software without a proper non-subscription business model. I'm not going back to fucking Adobe and it's ilk.
I tried ;) GIMP developers aren't very open to external contributions. I don't consider my attempts to be of low quality either, but the bike shedding resulted in them never being accepted. "It's best to wait until X lands" or "I think this will be part of Y".
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
Won't this end up how Draftsight did? (Free for years but required user details, and then Dassault decided to disable each and every free installation and require a subscription)
Oh this is so sad. I was literally trying to buy a license for Photo the other day and confused as to why. I don’t want a Canva license I don’t want a bloody subscription
I'm surprised people aren't really talking about how this affects Adobe going into the future. Adobe frankly has been hostile to it's users for the past while, this should really shake up the game. Creatives now have access to a pro-level tool for free with the option to pay extra for AI features. This is a clear shot across Adobe's bow and positions Canva to control the creative vertical from professionals to the average person.
Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".
I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.
[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.
The complaining is off the charts! Nothing in your life would have changed if you hadn't heard about this free product. Now you rest sleepless and grind your teeth because other people get to enjoy free high quality software.
Don't worry, I sleep tight and don't grind my teeth (at least not over Affinity).
What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.
I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)
I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.
And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.
What? How is selling a product with the promise of future updates under the same terms not owing us something? This is not some FOSS project we're taking about here.
bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.
also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
Your perpetual license is still valid for the v2 suite. Nothing was swapped - the product you paid for is no longer getting updates.
Just because people have been asking for features doesn't mean your perpetual license is owed those features??? That's an incredible amount of entitlement.
There's a custom patched wine that can run version 1 reasonably well, and efforts were ongoing for version 2. Haven't really tried it since I'm not a artist. https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
I own Affinity products and I used to be able to login to Serif's site to download them. Now that download link seems to have gone. I wish I had archived those images. Not sure if they would keep working though.
You can link your V2 store purchases by signing into the app, clicking the dropdown with your name in the top left of the popup window, and clicking on the "Advanced" dropdown
I'm not disappointed at how far Affinity has pushed the baseline for graphic design software up until this point for me with V1 and V2. I'll stay tentatively hopeful that we don't see this backslide in V3 even though i'm not expecting the same development velocity for new baseline features outside of the subscription now.
I'm not that hopeful though.. with freemium, everything is subject to be clawed back slowly into a subscription if the subscription offering fails to perform well enough.
As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example.
Edit: Just checked out the app. They essentially put Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher together in one app, switchable from a tab. Honestly, it's executed well. I hope it stays free—these apps are legitimately useful replacements for their Adobe equivalents.
I was skeptical about the all-in-one but it's executed really well, to the point that now I really want Adobe to do the same thing for Lightroom (Classic) and Photoshop.
Would be great to be able to switch between them on the same photo with tabs in one app. LR already uses ACR as the backend.
Combining vector and raster editors makes some amount of sense since the raster editor had some vector capabilities anyway, but yeah, tossing in layout/desktop publishing feels kind of weird. It's a bit like combining a microwave oven and a blender.
It looks very similar to what they already had. If you had all three they all were already integrated, you can just switch between the different types of editing modes.
This is well timed as my wife has lost her educator status, and we've canceled Adobe Creative Cloud this month as we can't stomach the jump from £400 to £800/yr.
I expressly bought this software (Designer, Photo, Publisher) out of principle, against Adobe's enshittification and monopolisation, and because it was premised on "pay once; own it forever".
This is obviously the 'tech circle of life' in action, but... how depressing...
I've always been guilty of preaching market diversification but sticking with the big(ger) players, but this sort of thing illustrates the need for multiple, viable players that all have good market share, so that – whenever one gets cannibalised and debased into some VC-money-addled marketing funnel – there are others to which people can flock in support/protest
AI has now devoured humanity, and not even with entertainment if it was in a proper dystopian way. It's just engorging all the software products we love, accelerating enshitiffication. We just get another fucking subscription. Why can't we have killer robots to fight instead?
On first impression it feels wonky. I have v2 installed for Photo, Design and Publisher and they all feel much better to work with. I guess I can count my blessings and at least be grateful that it's not yet another Electron clusterfuck a la New Outlook
I'm a loyal Serif customer and paid for their software. I LOVE Affinity. And I HATE "free" commercial products because they need to extract revenue from subscription services, ads, data selling etc.
This is the first step toward making Affinity become another rental application like Photoshop. Escaping Adobe's predatory business model is exactly why I became a Serif customer in the first place.
I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva.
This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription.
I understand why you feel that way. Having being involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_
“free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
> I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
I actually can't but I'd welcome hearing more about the strategy. I suspect what you're alluding to is maybe an open-core model? Generate free value for the entire ecosystem and then capture a portion of it with value-adding paid features? I'd be interested in that but I don't see where the FOSS layer is here.
> I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding
I also want to do mission-driven and moral work in the tech industry but I think there may be a disconnect between how the general population sees the tech industry and how it sees itself. This is my motivation to make these comments; not to be antagonistic and unpleasant for no reason but to attempt to hold up a mirror and show the tech industry the crisis of confidence that it faces. It would be like Philip Morris - after decades of subverting science and pushing cigarettes - launching a vape and expecting to receive the benefit of the doubt that the product has no downsides. Gone are the days of Silicon Valley being the warm and cuddly companies saving the world from their beanbags and open concept offices.
You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.
What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.
> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?
Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.
People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.
This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.
Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
But hey, anything that puts pressure on Adobe and makes them sweat a little is a win in my book. Fuck them.
Now, if maybe Apple would actually do something with their Pixelmator acquisition and re-release aperture, both Apple and Canva/Affinity can start going after Adobe.
You can always refuse offers. Plenty of people enjoy working long hours and answering endless customer support issues for no revenue. Well, there must be someone out there.
Is this built with JS / something like Fabric JS? There are some things that feel very similar to a web app that I worked on before. Wondering if there's plans to have a plugin API at some point if it is.
Interesting move by this company to expand into the creative suite space...
BUT I'm curious how they'll handle interoperability with existing workflows... Are there import/export paths for PSD, Sketch, Figma... Without that it's just another silo...
ALSO for freelancers and small teams licensing models matter... a subscription tied to an account can be a hurdle if you need to collaborate with clients outside the ecosystem...
Would love to see more clarity on offline use, local file formats and plugin APIs... those details make or break a creative suite...
Why did they force the use of Safari to sign into the app? What's the disrespect with the user's browser of choice (and one that already has the valid token)?
Yeah this is driving me crazy. It must be a bug because it says "a new tab has been opened in your default browser" but my default browser is not Safari.
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.
1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.
2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!
3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.
Any app that requires an account just to run a totally-local app, is also a company that can unilaterally deny your ability to run said software on your own computer for whatever reason they want.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If I install it, it should be mine to do whatever the hell I want to do with it, online OR OFFLINE.
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.
I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.
Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
Seems much better than was feared, though I haven't yet downloaded and tried the new version and there's still plenty of room for things to decay in the future.
It requiring an account (and thus, internet connectivity) to use is offputting, though. That is a prime enabler of enshittification, since it allows Canva to force updates that users may not necessarily desire. Hopefully it's easy to reverse engineer so old versions can be preserved and remain functional.
I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.
This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(
The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."
Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!
So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.
Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.
Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.
My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"
- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.
- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.
Do you find CD-Keys that round-trip one time, ever to be a violation of a perpetual license? That’s effectively what “login to an account” means - especially if it works offline forever, afterward. (I haven’t checked if it does, in this case)
If it's a one-time license validation, no. That's fine. If it's "login every time to be able to use the app" then that is something that, while is not necessarily a deal breaker in all cases, really annoys me.
Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.
Side/relevant (?) note, earlier this month, serif had made affinity free (at least for iPad if not for others as well). Many had speculated a v3 or something coming up… but I suppose “everything is free” is pretty nice too?
(Idk why everyone’s disappointed, it seems clear that canvas hopes the AI is good enough to get people to fork over their money. That’s… alright, as of now?)
disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.
> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?
I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?
(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)
not just identical, the new "free" thing will have more. popular requests like image trace and vector blend go to the "free" but not v2 (which, on its own is understandable tbh, no one expects a one time purchase of v2 to improve for eternity)
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.
The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.
i would gladly pay $500 for GIMP if i felt their developers would prioritize features that i actually need out of an image manipulation program. they never have and by the looks of things, they never will. it's too bad.
Sooo, the main reason we looked at Affinity as an alternative to the Adobe suite was the fact that it was a one-time purchase without forced updates or all the extra garbage Adobe obsessively adds that slows down each new version. Affinity was nice but just not quite there, in my opinion, as a daily driver for print design and pre-press.
Once they were bought by Canva, whose software I find atrocious, I gave up on it.
My problem with this is that it seems like a gateway to being forced to pay monthly, Adobe-style. Or else what they're really selling are the AI tools. Just sell me a solid piece of software I can keep using forever offline. I can still do all my design work in Illustrator CS6 if I want to haul out a 15 year old laptop. Sell me a version of that for Apple Silicon and I'll happily pay for it.
And if you want just a photo editor, not a vector software, I really recommend Pixelmator Pro. I've had it and Affinity Photo for years, but I find myself sticking with Pixelmator more often than not.
I got interested in Pixelmator Pro after Canva acquired Affinity, and then lost interest again when Apple bought them. They aren’t exactly good stewards of their own pro apps.
I have been curious about Amadine for a few years, but honestly at this point it feels that if I’m going to invest any time in learning a new vector drawing tool (for like the fourth or fifth time), it’s probably a good idea to try Inkscape first. They were working on Affinity Designer file imports a few versions back.
Great tip, will give that a try!
To find it in the Mac Appstore it is called 'Amadine' (without the 'n')
It seems alright at first glance, thanks again for this tip.
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
If I have to "sign up" then I don't really consider it free. Maybe still a good deal for some who need it, but I won't casually try this out like I would if I could just do it anonymously.
I'd love to have an actually free alternative to the offerings from those rapacious thugs over at Adobe.
/RANT
But this isn't actually free. Rather than paying with currency, you pay with your PII and, presumably, your attention as you're relentlessly marketed to by Canva and by whomever they decide to sell your PII.
This is all too common and folks seem to be okay with it for some unknown reason. If you walked into an art supply store, grabbed the stuff you wanted/needed and headed to the cashier with cash and they refused to sell you anything unless you provided them with your name, phone number, email address, etc., etc., etc. you'd likely walk out without purchasing anything. [N.B.: Yes, Radio Shack always asked for that info, but didn't require it for purchases.]
Yet it seems that selling your personal details and attention is perfectly fine online.
What's more, since you must have a valid "account" with Canva to use their "free" offering, you are also subject (generally without recourse) to changes in the licensing/subscription models and they can take it away whenever they feel like it. What could go wrong? It's not like that's ever been an issue, right?
I'd love to use Affinity Studio. But I won't. Because the price is too high for me.
I'd note that these sorts of shenanigans aren't limited to Canva -- far from it. It's just one more vendor contributing to the further enshittification of the tech sphere. And more's the pity.
/RANT
Why is/isn't it too "expensive" for you? (Note, this is a real question, not a poke at anyone.)
I got the email just now about this. I was happy to pay real money for good software as I had done for Affinity V1 and would have upgraded to V3… but now it’s free because we are the business now.
With a big dollop of AI slop on top.
Every single time some acquisition happens, this happens.
I am more than happy to pay good money for quality software to support a business so it doesn’t need to resort to this. Even a monthly subscription would have been preferable.
It is all apps combined in one. It is free. Requires Canva account. AI features require Canva Premium subscription. No iPad app (yet). Still missing RTL support.
what people actually want: to pay the ridiculously cheap $20/mo or whatever it is for Photoshop, but to use whichever backend they want for generative AI, not the other way around.
I opened an SVG file, copy-pasted a shape, exported the file and the new shape was wrapped in a transform tag, which was absolutely unnecessary. Won't be using this.
Once there was a great app, Gravit Designer. It produced the cleanest SVG markup. Too bad Corel murdered it.
It's par for the course, Illustrator 2025 is 2.8 gigs on my Mac for just the binary, 3.29 gigs for its directory in /Applications for some of its support files, plus however much space it takes up in ~/Library for more of its support files.
Photoshop's another 4.8 gigs for its binary and InDesign's another 2, so Affinity's doing pretty well to get some part of the functionality of all of those in a mere 3.5 gigs. Or Adobe's hilariously bloated. Or both. Let's go with both, really.
You're wrong about that point, it works offline just fine after activation. It's even stated in their FAQ. Of course it's possible for them to change that at any time.
Fine, but the Mac mini I downloaded this in has very little internal storage, so I am not using this and will only keep the old designer and publisher apps around (Pixelmator is better for my use case)
I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here:
Serif is the company that originally built this software.
--------
2014–2024
Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model:
- Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent)
- Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent)
- Affinity Publisher: print and layout design (Adobe InDesign equivalent)
They were solid, professional tools without subscriptions like Adobe, a big reason why many designers loved them.
-------
2024
Canva acquired Serif.
-------
2025 (today)
The product has been relaunched. The three apps are now merged into a single app, simply called Affinity, and it follows a freemium model.
From what I’ve tested, you need a Canva account to download and open the app (you can opt out of some telemetry during setup).
The new app has four tabs:
- Vector: formerly Affinity Designer
- Pixel: formerly Affinity Photo
- Layout: formerly Affinity Publisher
- Canva AI: a new, paid AI-powered section
Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/h1S6fcK
Hope can help!
This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif.
Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone else.
I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize
Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)
> Opus
Which software is that? I can only think about either the open source codec or the LLM from Anthropic.
You are far too trusting. The free users are the product. It’s now a platform, not an app.
I'm guessing they are giving the core away for free to collect training data.
You can opt out of the telemetry sharing
They claim not to, but I am extremely suspicious.
>No, your content in Affinity is not used to train AI-powered features, or to help AI features learn and improve in other ways, such as model evaluation or quality assurance. In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.
I mean, be suspicious, that’s always good. But have proof before being certain of something you don’t have facts to back up.
>But have proof before being certain of something you don’t have facts to back up
When it comes to such things, it's better to assume bad intent.
Assuming corporate benevolence as the default is foolish.
This is a better point than the one I made
That’s what suspicion means.
That is why I said I'm suspicious, and did not make a claim that they are doing it. Thanks for your input.
I've been using ByteDance's CapCut video editor that has this business model and I've been blown away by the top quality tool you get for free. It really doesn't feel scammy when they ask for money for fancy features that cost them extra GPU cycles to run the AI models.
To add to this, Davinci Resolve is also great freemium software IMO
Once AI blows up in a spectacular unprofitable mess (as it will for 90% of the companies in this space), then what though?
Given that it’s the only thing keeping the US economy afloat right now? Then many of us are loosing our jobs, and no longer having access to drawing tools will matter little.
If the bubble pops, we'll lose our jobs. If it doesn't and the hype turns out to be real, then we'll still lose our jobs. Tomato, potato.
I think it depends on how it's used or integrated. Image generation and editing seems to be the of the more useful things. "Take outt the power lines from this photo." Etc.
Well all have bigger problems when that happens
I am unclear on the problem: are the apps, previously free, significantly more limited than their prior free versions unless/until you also purchase a subscription for the CanvaAI portions?
That aside, this isn’t a new thing for Canva, they aren’t chasing AI here, in this space GenAI is chasing the use case that Canva has been filling for a while, and incorporating genai as part of that is just, you know, “hey lots of people use this ai tool for design work now so maybe we add one because like it or not it’s how thing are”. Design is the Canva space, it’s not like they did a pivot to crypto.
Personally I think it's great I both get the app for free and they remove all the AI from it. Couldn't get any better!
“You can’t have AI unless you pay extra for it.”
“Um… okay. No AI for me.”
What will you recommend to people instead?
To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.”
Keeping in mind that:
1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy)
2. Large ML models require a lot of resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!)
3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.)
Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster.
Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster.
Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable.
You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.)
Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.
> 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand
No, there’re not. People with influence or who have invested in the space say that these features are in demand/the next big thing. In reality, I haven’t seen a single user interview where the person actively wanted or was even excited about AI.
Photoshop now has a bunch of features that get used in professional environments. And in the end user space, facial recognition or magic eraser are features in apps like Google Photos that people actively use and like. People probably don't care that it's AI under the hood, in fact they probably don't even realize.
There is a lot of unchecked hype, but that doesn't mean there is no substance.
Similar, I'm accustomed to using the Magic Wand tool in Paint[1] and Pinta[2] to select pixels based on color. I can't find this anywhere in Affinity.
[1] https://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/MagicWand.html
[2] https://www.pinta-project.com/user-guide/wand/
I didn't make any assertion about AI, only about "AI" (note the quotes in my GP comment) — i.e. the same old machine-learning-based features like super-resolution upscaling, patch-match, etc, that people have been adding to image-editing software for more than a decade now, but which now get branded as "AI" because people recognize them by this highly-saturated marketing term.
Few artists want generative-AI diffusion models in their paint program; but most artists appreciate "classical" ML-based tools and effects — many of which they might not even think of as being ML-based. Because, until recently, "classical ML" tools and effects have been things run client-side on the system, and so necessarily small and lightweight, only being shipped if they'll work on the lowest-common-denominator GPU (esp. "amount of VRAM") that artists might be using.
The interesting thing is that, due to the genAI craze, GPU training and inference clusters have been highly commoditized / brought into reach for the developers of these "classical ML" models. You don't need to invest in your own hyperscale on-prem GPU cluster to train models bigger than fit on a gaming PC any more. And this has led to increased interest in, and development of, larger "classical ML" models, because now they're not so tightly-bounded by running client-side on lowest-common-denominator hardware. They can instead throw (time on) a cloud GPU cluster to train their model; and then expect the downstream consumer of that model (= a company like Canva) to solve the problem of running the resulting model not by pushing back for something size-optimized to be run locally on user machines, but rather by standing up an model-inference-API backend running it on the same kind of GPU IaaS infra that was used to train it.
The image generation models have been super useful for anyone wanting to deliver any sort of production content for years. Ofc nobody _promotes_ that. Using ai images is like taking photos as reference for collages. Anyone with a subscription to an image bank is likely happy enough to minibanana some generic references.
> and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off.
Just release some simple free "test application" that checks whether the computer satisfies the system requirements and does something "simple" (but relevant for the user) so that the users want to try out this simple free test application and want to update their hardware so that it can run.
Now, after the users have been incentivized to update their hardware so that they can run the cool test application, you can upsell your users to the "full software experience". :-)
Seems like a waste when you know most computers are laptops that won't meet minimum requirements.
This depends a lot on the group of users that you are talking about.
I'd buy some of these explinations, except the depth estimation, colorization, and super-resolution ML models they use in the app DO run locally and are still subscription-gated.
Apple has been doing on-device machine learning for portrait blurs and depth estimation for years now, though based on the UI, this might use cloud inference as well.
Granted, these aren't the super heavy ones like generative fill / editing, and I understand that cloud inference isn't cheap. A subscription for cloud-based ML features is something I'd find acceptable, and today that's what has launched... The real question is what they plan to do with this in 2-5 years. Will more non-"AI" features make their way into the pro tier? Only time will tell!
That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app.
The fact that the apps are now free, suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth.
---
Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one reflecting a much more aware/cynical take on how the software market works in 2025.
Adobe essentially charges a continuing fee just to continue to run the software they coded and shipped to you, on your own computer — regardless of whether you even care about any further software updates. (Sure, the subscription pays for other things, like Adobe Bridge cloud storage and so forth, but if you don't pay the subscription, you don't even get to just run the apps.)
But this also means that people quite often crack Adobe's apps — because there's something there of value to run on your own computer, if you just strip off the DRM.
Canva here are taking a much more pragmatic approach:
• Anything that is given to the user to run is free, because ultimately, if you charged for it, people would just crack it. They aren't bothering with DRM or even trying to treat the app itself as a revenue stream. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Especially if you're not in a market position where you think you can win the big enterprise customers over from Adobe.
• Anything that is run on your backend is charged for. Because users can't force your cloud services to do anything without a subscription. There's no "cracking" a cloud service.
• But also, crucially — if a feature is a "fake cloud" feature, where it could be "pulled down from the cloud" back into the client by writing a compatible implementation of the server backend that does some simple thing, and patching the software to speak to that server (either over the Internet, or to a local-on-the-machine background service that ships with the patch) — then users will do that. So you can only really charge for features that can't be "pulled down" in this way. Like, for example, features relying on some kind of secret-sauce ML model that you never expose to the client.
(And that last bit actually makes me less wary of their approach here: it suggests that they likely won't be charging for anything other than inherently "cloudy" features: these large-ML-model-driven features, cloud storage/collaboration features, etc. Which might mean that non-"cloudy" features get ignored... but likely not. For the same reason that Apple doesn't ignore macOS/iOS features in favor of iCloud features: new users won't be interested switching to the platform [and then potentially subscribing] if the base platform itself isn't competitive / doesn't serve their needs.)
Pricing in most businesses has little relation to the cost of developing and making the product. Most businesses price relative to the value that their product delivers to the customer. If there is robust competition, then the price is often driven down towards the cost, but it's not driven by the cost. In Adobe's case, they see that there is an entire industry of creative people using their products as their primary tool(s). Those employees are often paid well, with salaries from 50k-100k per year as common. Is it not reasonable (from Adobe's perspective) that employers pay 1/50th of the employee's salary for their primary and most useful tool? No one complains when the plumber requires a work truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools.
The price ceiling has little relation to cost, sure. But COGS sets an effective price floor — you'll be revenue-negative unless you do the math to ensure you're charging customers (especially your largest customers) at least COGS. COGS is the most critical number your enterprise salespeople will ask you for in order to backstop their negotiations.
For some companies, COGS and customer LTV are numbers with such different orders of magnitude that they don't even have to think about the COGS side.
But "software you charge a one-time fee for" generally produces a very low customer LTV; and "renting compute on someone else's GPU IaaS" generally produces a very high (customer-lifetime-integrated) COGS; so if they were sticking to the "just charge for the software" model, "COGS rising faster than CLTV" would be a direct threat to their business model. Which is... why they don't want to do that.
It's been a long time since I looked into it, but is pirating Adobe's products viable these days? I thought it was pretty much impossible, and the last piratable release is quite old.
Man. This is another case in favor of open source. OSS may take years to get there but it doesn't go poof in one sudden day either.
Open Source absolutely stops being maintained. And worse.
Yup, source code does not stay maintainable automatically. Just that code is open does not mean anyone can or wants to do any reasonable development.
The only ”safer” bets are the biggest projects providing critical infra for segments of economy like python for example.
I worked at Serif during the early years of their pivot from boxed desktop software in C++ for Windows to an internet company making modern design software. It was a nice place to work, had some good friends there. Been interesting watching their journey.
I got the impression there was a disconnect between product and eng teams based on quite a few spicy responses from Serif on the forums. Was that the case?
Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?
Nowhere even close
I haven't used it for that purpose much, but it seems to lag pretty far behind Photoshop/Affinity Photo.
I am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version.
This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades.
I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.
Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing:
And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans: Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.So, unless you want to use AI, which wasn't available in the previous products, you are not missing out on anything?
This is what I don’t understand. Why complain about it if the model gives you everything except the cloud service?
Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top.
If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
It is a freemium model, but they are doing it in the proper way. I’m a bit worried this could lead to enshittification down the road, but for now I’m glad they’re doing this, will definitely give it another try, and might throw in a few bucks even. (Especially if they reconstider their stance on Linux support!)
Nothing is free.
If they can't monetize the product with ai subscriptions they sure as hell will end up monetizing their users and their content.
You have to wonder though - why in the world would they offer it for free? They must have a trick up their sleeve.
Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.
Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.
Offering it for free is likely to increase their user base significantly, which in turn will increase the number of people who end up paying for the AI features.
Is "Affinity Studio" the version that is online-only and was down with AWS a week ago? Or that's a different thing?
(I don't know much about Affinity suite)
No. It didn't exist a week ago and doesn't require Internet, apart from an initial login.
Why do you need to login into something that doesn't require Internet?
It's functionally identical to the software registration requirement of previous Affinity software releases, except that instead of verifying a registration number, it's now verifying a (currently) free Canva account credential.
you know why...
They're doing an Adobe Creative Cloud with Canva now, Great !
Without charging for the desktop software.
I still use the Affinity desktop apps (before the move to the store) and they're fine.
It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too).
Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
A sad end because of why? What has happened to make it a sad end?
> Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
It’s interesting that none of the independent tools survive for long. I wonder if Adobe Illustrator is so dominant that there is little room left for the competitors.
And so the enshittification begins. Such a shame to lose another set of solid, non-subscription-based desktop apps.
Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license.
In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it.
Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.
> But right now, they’ve just made it free.
It sounds like you're positioning this as a counter to the post you're replying to, but I think that is actually what they're complaining about.
> you only pay if you want Canva AI features
Right, so what they've done is tied their business model as a product to AI features and nothing else. That's not "oh good, I can use it for free", it's "oh no, they are no longer incentivised to care about the parts of the product I wanted".
> Perhaps it gets worse over time.
It quite literally always always does.
Yeah, 100% sure it will get worse, especially after the AI bubble pops.
the ai bubble has already popped!!! the biggest tech companies on the planet who are spending insane amounts of capex on “ai” keep reporting insane earnings reports one after another, things are popping left & right
I think you may be using a different definition of a "bubble popping."
hehehe I just might be ;)
> Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.
they always do
I realize that money rules everything but I find it so confusing that so many companies will spend a decade building a great product and then just exit with full knowledge that it will be the inevitable end of the relevance of their work.
You might think that some founders somewhere out there would be motivated by some level of ego to say “no, I won’t sell out, I built this amazing thing and the highest bidder owner will milk it dry.”
But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.
You can remain in control and continue to make good quality software, but that means staying small, very small, like a handful of people small. There are numerous software providers like that still making niche software.
It's a lesson as old as history: You either exit a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.
Perhaps they know that a large buyout will help their employees for various reasons, and they set aside their ego to take care of them.
A company that hasn’t sold out is Adobe— are we in love with Adobe?
Adobe is a public company, so they exited.
>> technology the cult of the exit rules all
Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).
You can have controlling ownership in a company that you don’t manage on a day-to-day basis.
It may or may not work out. Once you are not actively involved, its not per your vision anymore anyway. And at the end of the day, if you don't think e.g. in this case its very hard compete with Adobe and I really don't want to risk my payday, you'll sell it and move on to do whatever next you want to do.
If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
It's more complicated than that. Sometimes after 15 years, the founders want to move on and do something else. Or they want to build a dream house. Or their cofounder wants to get out. Or they hear the long-term vision of the acquiring company, and want to be a part of it.
Although it's an uphill battle, not every acquisition ends with the product being destroyed. Just look at what Apple did with NeXT and PA Semi…
You can have controlling stake in a company without working there day to day.
Apple literally destroyed those companies. After Apple acquired NeXT there was one less operating system on the market. PA Semi now doesn’t have a product that is sold to the open market.
Apple bought NeXT and made it one of the most popular operating systems on the planet.
What do you think MacOS since v10 is?
lmao ok
Because it’s not inevitable. I know it’s the fashion on HN to say it’s inevitable, but it’s not, and if it were, then it would be inevitable for all companies, including those who didn’t exit, which would mean those companies would fold, which would make it a capitalism problem, not a “founders exit” problem.
Either way, trying to place blame on individual people is kind of silly.
Maybe not inevitable but “most likely outcome by far.”
It’s not like your median founder hasn’t heard of enshittification. They just don’t care. They’re by and large out for a quick buck, not much different than a day trader or a gambler. And the VC system enables that rather than being focused on building companies that are generational and customer focused.
How much of this is just getting a skewed view because you don't typically hear about the acquisitions that don't happen?
Beyond that, overcoming bias is really hard. An acquirer is probably going to talk a good game about how the acquisition is going to benefit the product and the customers from more resources, better integration, etc. Hearing that, we know it's probably BS, or sincere but incorrect. But when an eight or nine figure pile of money is on the line, you have a very strong subconscious motivation to believe it.
Sigh. It was a great app.
Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)
To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.
This is a deletion.
- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.
- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
Everyone wanted a one time license, you aren't allowed to complain when that one-time licensed product stops getting updates.
Note: I own a license to V2 of the Serif suite.
> Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
How? First, by that time, you've usually spent many times more than it would have cost you to own the software outright, so the vendor is already better off. Second, if you stop paying, you lose access to the software, possibly with no other way to open existing files, etc. You're the one who's being held hostage - not the vendor.
As a hobbyist, I shudder to think that my total annual bill would be if all the software I use every now and then had a subscription model. It would be well in excess of $5,000/year.
Sure, if the subscription is unreasonably priced. Then yes, it will be unreasonable.
Final Cut Pro is a $300 piece of software with a $50/yr or $5/mo subscription. It would take you 6 years to reach the same price which shows the subscription cost is reasonable.
It's a separate issue when software is unreasonably priced in subscription mode, versus the merits of the subscription model itself.
All of my photos are stored in a big Lightroom database. If I wasn't using an old camera supported by Lightroom 5 (that I bought outright in 2011), and was using modern Lightroom instead, I would have to pay an ongoing cost just to maintain access to my photo database, in perpetuity.
This sucks no matter how much the subscription actually is right now. Losing access to all your old work in its original format if you don't pay a subscription to a company that might decide to do anything, up to and including shutting down the servers and killing the app? No thank you.
Yeah, Lightroom 5 hasn't had any updates, doesn't support any new cameras, etc. But it still works, I can still look at all the photos I took with my old camera, and all my edits, and this will work, for free, until Lightroom 5 bitrots away into not working on Windows 14 or whatever.
It sucks that I can't just buy a new version of Lightroom when I get a new camera, instead I'd have to jump ship or sell my soul to Adobe.
I understand what you're saying, and yeah, that does suck.
> Losing access to all your old work in its original format
Most photo editing apps retain your originals, even when they're in a database. For example, Apple Photos has a folder full of originals with no modifications. Does Lightroom not have this?
I understand that there is a lot of metadata that you also want, I'm just curious about this detail?
My beef isn't with products where you have a choice between perpetual and monthly. It's with products where you don't. This includes the "always-online freemium" model, where you only really lose features over time to drive free -> paid migration and show growth.
Subscriptions often don’t allow continuing use of even existing versions of the product after you stop paying - it’s not just about access to future updates.
The main exceptions are subscriptions that are explicitly for support and maintenance contracts on top of a perpetual license. There are also a few unusual business models, like JetBrains offer for subscriptions that last at least 12 months which grants a perpetual fallback license of the major versions (including future minor versions) that were current during any part of the subscription up through 12 months before cancellation.
Correct, and you're no longer paying so that's okay? It is unfortunate if the software stops existing but there is not a financial issue.
There is a big difference between buying a perpetual licence with extra yearly support packages versus leasing the software with on a subscription model. While the two options may appear to be the same thing, the first one doesn't remove your ability to run the software once you stop paying for support.
The best way that I have to describe it is in the first option you're buying a version of the software and then paying for updates and bug fixes in a flexible manner, while in the second option you're leasing use of the software for as long as you continue to pay.
I’d prefer to have them release a new version every X years and let me buy that for a fixed cost. (This is how Adobe used to work)
You can't have your cake (one time payments) and eat it too (software gets perpetual updates).
Perpetual licenses with 1 year of updates is a good middle ground, but they have said that the v2 suite will get maintenance updates for some period of time so even that type of license would not have changed this conversation.
Sure. I get that. My ideal scenario is that existing versions get security patches and critical bug fixes but you have to upgrade for new features.
But I realize that’s less lucrative and not how modern software tends to work
Except that you can, because every software company did this for decades… Want to upgrade to a new version of our product? That’s another one time fee for that version.
If you squint, this looks a lot like a subscription model, but with extra steps. Why it’s different is because those extra steps actually matter.
They matter to the people who aren’t subjected to subscription dark-patterns to keep them from unsubscribing for just a little bit longer. They matter to the product, development, and sales teams who know they actually have to produce and deliver something meaningful if they want repeat customers. The matter to the accounting teams on all sides of the transaction, in particular because subscription revenue or expenses can always be counted as “recurring” and this has implications on cash flow which itself can impact many things.
The pitch has always been “we grow with you, this is a win-win”, implying that perpetual license fees are actually good for you to pay. Ostensibly because keeping your supplier in business keeps you in business, but in reality it was totally possible for a software supplier to go out of business and for their customers to continue operating without issue for 5, 10, even 15+ years, before even considering finding a replacement software.
And despite the pitch seeming so sweet, the literature on why you want your software business to operate on a subscription model was always about gaining an advantage over your customers, however marginal it may be, and now the data has borne out that the advantage is stark.
I think people want either (a) a subscription that lets them keep the latest version perpetually, or (b) a perpetual license that provides some predictable amount of updates (this could be zero).
What people don't want is to pay for updates that they were led to believe they would get, but that they never got. Or to lose access to software that they paid a lot for, or that they got locked into (even free).
I don't think these are particularly difficult expectations to understand or meet.
It’s other way around, issue exists because of subscriptions and everyone rushing to subscription bandwagon
> That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
You also lose the ability to access your data in a lot of cases. That's the problem. I also own a v1 and v2 license for the Affinity stuff. I've used it to design myself exactly one logo, so I would have been way better off subscribing to Adobe's stuff for a month, right?
Wrong, at least in my opinion. The problem with subscriptions is that you lose control over future access to your data. For my logo, I'm fine with Affinity Designer v2 never getting updated as long as I can load the software and use it as-is.
I recently loaded up an abandoned Java project that I haven't looked at in a dozen years. I use IntelliJ IDEA and it wouldn't load in the most recent version of IDEA because the Gradle version used in the project was too old. I fired up my self-hosted server that I used at the time, installed IDEA v8, added a hostname for the Sonatype Nexus server to my DNS, and loaded my old project to look around.
You can barely do that anymore because you don't own or control anything. Everything is subscription based, pay forever, with deep links to infrastructure you don't control either. I can mostly do it because I refuse to get on the subscription "never control anything" bandwagon, but I'll still probably get burned by online activation at some point.
Just wait until everyone has 2 decades of AI context locked away behind paywalls controlled by a handful of companies. Everything in existence will be vendor locked and those companies will usurp every novel idea anyone is naive enough to feed in as context.
> the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it
There's a plague of this on the entire industry now. Free apps abound, none of them will do exactly what you need, all of them will point you to the shiny unfree thing that will.
I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware.
If you get value out of the free part of a tool, great! If not, then you get to choose to pay for the rest or not. Personally I'm happy that it tends to be the feature set I can live without that costs money. Not always, but often enough.
> I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware.
It's not even close. This is more akin to shareware where Bill Gates shows up at your house to collect a payment every month and formats your hard drive if you don't cough up the money.
Shareware gave you a perpetual license and control that couldn't be taken away, especially before the internet.
Fair, but shareware was pay-once, which many people find preferable to a subscription-chained model.
That's a great distinction.
There is a big difference between a one time payment and a recurring payment, especially if the company canceling the product or going out of business means you can no longer use the tool, and I honestly steer clear of those in most cases.
You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features.
Yes, that's the situation at launch. The fear that's expressed above is that the subscription model incentivizes pushing people towards it as hard as possible. It's the exact opposite of Serif's straightforward model from before. Get ready for most new features (including ones that are unrelated to AI) to become locked to the subscription model. When they think they're not getting enough out of Affinity, they may also start cutting core functionality to force people to subscribe. Maybe, a limit on how many documents you can edit at once, or a layer limit (for the photo part), or an object limit (for the vector/"designer" part). This is how all of these subscriptions go nowadays.
>You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features
And if Canva decides that "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further,"[0] what will you do then? Go and rent the Adobe subscription suite instead?
[0] http://www.quickmeme.com/img/32/32b4229145de0a2c1171b9b5757f...
The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.
I'm sad (buyer of both v1 and v2). Being a paid app as opposed to require a subscription was the main selling over the Adobe Suite. A lot of users migrated to Affinity for that reason. As the free version will get more and more crippled as they move to pushing subscriptions, why not switch back to Adobe?
I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.
I’m kinda keen on this. A few months ago I was looking at making a one time magazine print, but I discovered there were essentially no affordable options. The affinity option was the cheapest one, but still unaffordable for a one time project.
I don’t even mind paying a subscription but the adobe option requires you to get a minimum of 12 months.
I just want to pay $50 and have a single version I can download that doesn't need to auto-update and that I can use as long as I want.
> they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it.
There’s as of yet no confirmation about this. There is a lot of speculation, but there has not been official confirmation.
It's right there in the FAQ.
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates."
> they're completely stopping all updates to v2
The article itself says at least this bit. I didn't notice anything about a "trace" thing though, but I was just skimming.
I did pay for perpetual access to it 2 months ago! :)
As a windows PC user I am hoping the compatibility issues wont effect me and I can enjoy the product offline.
i wonder if you get some type of compensation if you paid recently.
A one time license never entitles you to ongoing updates.
That's not true. I've paid for a one time license for software before and received updates until the next major release.
On the bright side, i am still using Paintshop Pro v7.04 from 2001, so we may be able to use Affinity for another 20 years, too.
That sucks for that usecase, agreed.
On the plus side, there is finally a free modern piece of software that matches 80s MacDraw and MacPaint on the Mac. (Keynote isn’t it.)
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
yeah I liked it too but then, I realize how little I pay for this type of software vs how much I pay for subscription for services that I honestly barely use.
financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly. People vote with their wallets, and they vote subscription.
It's sad, I loooooved Affinity and their licensing schemes, but honestly... I can see why they are moving.
The AI stuff though makes no sense to me? How many people will actually use it? But then I am mostly programmer and I use these tools only time to time.
This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.
In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.
In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.
> indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model
The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.
No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.
If the competition is making more money on subscriptions, they can hire more people to improve the product, ultimately beating the non subscription options.
> In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting.
I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.
Free software is dead? Free software is still there, same as it ever was. And it will be there forever. The more people flee to it from SAAS shittification, the better it will get.
It’s not dead, but a lot of it is stagnant. How much has Gimp improved in the last 10 years vs photoshop.
Gimp has improved a lot and is still awesome value in term of dollar to service provided, even while making a small monthly or yearly donation.
Another Gimp diehard for life here. I should make a donation, I appreciate the reminder.
People go on and on about how bad Gimp's UI is, and while I won't defend it I will the criticism is 99% overblown.
https://i.imgur.com/3gqmu9N.png
If you take 10-15 minutes to customize the UI it can be pretty damn simple if you want. I'd say those minutes are worth it to avoid a subscription and to support a true OSS stalwart project.
Gimp, maybe not so much[1], but I understand that Krita has improved quite a bit. And regardless of stagnancy, both of these applications will continue to exist long after Affinity gets our-incredible-journeyed.
[1]: (FWIW, I don't know one way or the other. Apologies to any Gimp developers here.)
Gimp actually, finally had their big 3.0 update earlier this year which "modernized" (to ~5 years ago) a lot of the codebase. The UI is mostly the same but it's using much more modern UI components (editing text isn't terrible now, etc.)
https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/03/16/gimp-3-0-released/
Gimp's problem is mostly one of funding and attention, like most OSS projects. But it's never stopped development, which I think is impressive 27 years on.
Imagine where Gimp would be if any company treated it like Valve treats WINE.
Oh nice! Just gave it a shot and it does feel a lot more pleasant to use on macOS than what I remember.
I mean, what’s the problem? You wanted a pay once use forever and you got that with v2. So keep using v2. No one is going to charge your credit card.
I paid for v1 and v2, and would have happily paid for v3.
The reason I’m not using Adobe is to avoid their onerous subscription.
If Affinity has moved to a subscription model then why bother not using the incumbent?
Because Adobe in design costs a minimum of $430AUD while this is free.
I think the price points will be different.
Okay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
Yeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now).
Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
They seemed to disagree with you.
They being Canva. I can't imagine most people who worked on Affinity are thrilled about this either.
> . V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
How does it becomes useless?
Until there is a new format that you absolutely can't avoid on your day to day life there is no reason you cannot use it the same way you have used it until now.
I think a lot of that feeling is just FOMO.
For personal use, piracy is always an option.
How does that work with SaaS?
I've been thinking about this lately. It's really difficult to understand where your dependencies are with modern software.
I might built myself a full blown piracy machine that never gets to access the internet so I have access to an environment that can't get taken away. At the very least, it'll be a good way to learn how much dependence there is on internet connectivity, which we all know the answer to - way too much.
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.
Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.
Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
It doesn't. But Affinity Studio works locally (I assume no one needs the AI features).
timeon_affinity_001@gmail.com
Useless? My guy, it’s a photo editing program. You don’t constantly need the new hotness. They don’t break old versions of their files every update like Substance Painter. I bought v2 more because I support Affinity not because I needed new features.
It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software, and png, jpeg and standard camera raw formats aren’t going away.
There's already precedence for app deterioration in their iOS apps. Affinity Photo V1 for iPad lost a lot of functionality in brushes and other features with later versions of iOS (e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1725daf/what...)
It was never updated.
Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.
Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.
> but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.
For it to be a problem you need to actually buy said new cameras and lenses.
I am still using my Pentax K5 II and Samsung NX from a bit more than a decade ago (as well as some analog cams but I disgress).
There is a lot of FOMO + Gear Aquisition Syndrome to make that a problem. Maybe one should focus more on actually having a life,using the products they akready own, make arts or memories instead of thinking what is new on the market they are missing out and what to buy next.
Makes me think of those people, perfectly happy with Airpod pro v2 who purchase v3 ones, only to end up frustrated by their new purchase.
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
If you need a constant stream of updates for the software to be useful, this seems like a reasonable fit for a subscription.
That sounds like ongoing work that you should pay for if you want to benefit.
Yeah, but Lensfun (the library they use for this) doesn't have anywhere to donate.
That does make things a bit more complicated.
Very true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”
I haven't checked, do they use Apple's RAW library on macOS? If so, at least support might evolve with macOS updates for the time being.
Serif (I guess Canva now) maintains their own which uses the Lensfun database.
> It’ll keep working for decades to come
“Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.
If you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.
Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely.
Of course, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.
This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.
This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.
Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
Learning GIMP as a PS user is like changing operating systems.
... but it has always been worth it for any normal person, IMO.
That said... PS's new AI tools might make GIMP no longer a viable option even for normies like me.
You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.
I hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.
Nondestructive changes, in Affinity, Photoshop and Substance Painter are all amazing, yeah. They also exist on all 3 of those software :)
In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.
Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)
Smart objects and smart filters were present in early CS versions I think. CS5/CS6 had them for sure, though I don't doubt that new filters and features have been added in CC.
The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.
Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.
Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.
[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...
I primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.
The FOMO created by online games. You need the latest DLC to get the latest armour you know...
Any type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.
I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.
And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.
And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
>It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software
Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.
V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
Is it really?
People on HN are always talking about how they use pre-Creative Cloud versions of Adobe products years and years later.
My firewall already blocks Affinity programs from accessing the internet without my permission. I guess I'll set it to an automatic deny so I don't lose any features, or have to deal with any nagging.
People on HN also tend to use Apple hardware so it's no surprise that for them unmaintained software is dead software, because it will likely break 2 or 3 macOS versions from now.
I feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.
Yep, this is the first step of enshittification. It's all downhill from here. It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year.
> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year
It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.
I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
I paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.
still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).
It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.
nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
What a fascinating thread. I bought Affinity Photo and Designer V1 as one-time purchases a few years ago. I didn't upgrade to V2 when those came out. I have continued to occasionally use the V1 apps - I was just in Photo the other day.
To me this is exactly why you would want to buy software licenses as one-time purchases - the company can't rug pull you for what you already bought. If I want, I can keep using the Affinity apps on this machine indefinitely.
It seems a lot of people are really frustrated that they purchased software and now the company is doing something else. Isn't the whole point of purchasing a license for standalone software that you are protected in case the company goes under, or gets bought, or decides to do something else?
Do people think the apps they bought are going away? Or did they expect to get free updates forever for their one-time purchase? Or am I missing something in this announcement?
You answered your own question. Buying a perpetual license ensures the company can’t rug pull you. Not having the option for a perpetual license gives no guarantees of the sort. One of Serif’s top selling points was the perpetual license, and people were rightfully nervous about the Canva acquisition. They even made it a huge point in their announcement to reassure people who were nervous about the perpetual license model going away.
A perpetual license does not entitle me to anything beyond the scope of the license, of course. It’s great that I can use V2 for as long as it serves my needs. But now, when someone new is looking for graphic design software, or if I find am missing some good features in V1 or V2 that get added to the new software, of course I will be upset that I no longer have the option to upgrade to or recommend the non-rug-pullable option.
I feel like it’s not unreasonable to have a negative opinion towards the decisions companies make that further the enshittification of the professional software world.
They expected to be able to upgrade it in the future to most recent version with a one-time payment fee, like they used to so far.
What? Lots of us bought v1, then v2, and would have bought v3 too.
It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license).
But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model.
I think their bet is enough people will want the AI, which I think is correct.
As a long time Affinity user, first reaction was: "see, there is the subscription", but on second thought, fair enough, well played. I'll probably get the AI subscription as well.
I do wonder if over time more features will go into that premium plan, but we'll see.
Edit: It seems like some of the AI stuff runs on device, they are not very clear about what does or doesn't. That makes me change my opinion a bit, as that's just straight up a freemium subscription model.
I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal your shit for "AI training."
Hell, has anyone looked at the EULA for this "free" product? Maybe it's already doing that.
> Free is unsustainable
This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.
Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).
> This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
In my experience, senior sales/revenue/whatever leaders see the free version as competing with the sales motion, not as a funnel (regardless of the reality). And argue to limit it more and more for short term conversion improvements.
I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was. Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remaining tools, there is no one left with "selling desktop design applications" as a business model. That seems long-term unsustainable if your interest is "desktop design applications" that do their jobs well with few upsells to long-term subscriptions. The unsustainability that leads to upsells and subscription paywalls only generally ever get worse over time, because users of the free part aren't the desired customer.
On the plus side, when they layoff every single person that worked on Affinity in order to better align with something something market strategy, those people will be able to get together and start a new non-subscription desktop design applications company... with blackjack... and hookers.
I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.
Today's Corel seems very much a "use at your own security/bug risk" license-selling factory. They still sell support contracts (because those are lucrative) and sometimes patch the software for big security issues, but they seem to do that on a staff that is far more salespeople and lawyers (to wrangle ancient B2B legal contracts and new "minimal effort" security support contracts) than software developers. Their business model doesn't seem to be as much "selling desktop software" as it seems to be "fulfilling old support contracts for the zombies of classic desktop software".
That said, yes, maybe PSP and CorelDraw will solve some uses of parts of Affinity's stack for people looking for an alternative and don't mind paying close to full price for code that is mostly frozen in time from the late 90s and early 00s.
> free is unsustainable
Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.
They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.
So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Would they continue to invest in Affinity development if it isn’t converting in to paying users?
It looks like it is an offline application (after license verification) in he FAQ
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
As a long time Adobe "user" (read: hater) I'm curious if this decision targets Adobe or Microsoft options more..? Maybe both.
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
Until you get a 2am e-mail stating that they've updated their terms of service, and by reading the e-mail, you have agreed to the updated terms because the chances of you challenging this in court are precisely zero, no matter what the internet IANALs say.
Is Da Vinci Resolve's free version unsustainable?
No. Because it's part of the cost for Black Magic Design that if they want to have their own hardware and not have the industry's monopolists (Adobe and Apple) make it difficult to maximise their sales, they need to control their own app.
This is what Canva think about their asset marketplace and AI tools, I guess. They need their own app to make sure Adobe can never so much as tug at the corner of the rug.
Free is not unsustainable if there is a paid tier.
For people like you who only use it occasionally, you're not the kind of person who's going to pay in the first place.
It's sustainable if the professionals people who use it daily/weekly find it's worth it to pay for the AI tools. And if you're a professional, you'll likely be needing those AI tools to keep up.
Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
> Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.
I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?
Unless you freeze your machine in its current state, software that isn't maintained will eventually stop working.
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
It’s not just the case of badly written software. It will work until they shut off the license servers.
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.
This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
This is how things have worked since programmable software was invented.
That doesn't mean it disappears though - it still exists, just in a non-working state.
And proton and the community do well to keep old things working.
Dosbox is a testament to that.
Legally, you can't redistribute it
your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.
This really hurts to see, everything for the whole month has shattered trust in a way that is hard to believe. Any chances we can see some reversals?
I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.
Also free is never free.
What changes for me as iPad user?
Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?
So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?
It's not free, it's a lure. There is a hook hiding somewhere.
The real cost of tools like these is not the upfront price, but the time invested learning the tool and incorporating it into your workflow.
Krita is clunky, but good enough for me, and it really is free.
Update: Changed my analogy to lure.
It's smart only if their business goal is to lose every single customer they had specifically because it wasn't subscription software and didn't have the AI junk that their customers specifically did not want.
Yeah I'm not sure throwing away their single advantage (that's not hyperbole) over Adobe is a smart play
> They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete
I assumed the jury was still out in that one.
I have a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (I was a long-time, early employee and negotiated this as a perk). One reason I paid for and use Affinity is that it DOESN'T have AI. I want to be completely sure the photos I edit don't go up to a "cloud" somewhere, etc.
I feel like everyone is very negative about something that hasn't happened yet. This gives a desktop environment to Canva users, where the revenue actually is. It's both a trojan horse and a usable product. Will everyone's worse fears come true? Maybe, maybe not. Mean time you have an excellent app, for free, and very few software products, free, open source, closed source, perpetual, subscription.... last "forever". They are often obsoleted by some new product, new workflow or just a new OS. Take it for what it is right now.
The new version is a nice update over v2, with some great new features.
The downside is that some useful features like background removal will never come to the non-subscription version. OTOH, the subscription is cheap if you think of it as license cost for an Adobe alternative.
> Will everyone's worse fears come true?
Yes, they will. Enshittification is a constant and is driven by misaligned investment incentives to that of good products.
After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer.
C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)...
Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for everyone else to stop moaning]
Version 2 has been fine. FWIW though, I don't use Affinity Photo (but bought it too because I like the company). I'm Pixelmator Pro when it comes to pixels (but love Affinity Designer and Publisher).
What was the difference between v1 and v2?
V1 felt polished to a degree that implied the developers had thought a lot about how their product should provide a compelling user experience. It was also very performant and rarely crashed.
V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).
Ah, that's too bad. Thanks for the background!
Awesome, expected Canva were going to jack up the prices or turn it into a subscription after acquisition. A freemium version is very welcome for the rare times I need to use it. No plans to ever be a paying customer myself (sorry Canva), but nice to know it's still being actively developed.
Just noticed the AI feature integrations are locked behind a premium sub, makes sense to go for a wide funnel with a premium free product then up-sell to people who want the AI integration, should turn out to be commercially successful.
Really hoping a Linux version is in the works. Hopefully the exodus from Windows picks up so we can accelerate the timeline for Linux support. (Currently using the amazing https://photopea.com for most image edits on Linux)
I doubt this is good, I'd expect minimal investment in the free version and ever increasing subscriptions. I WANT to pay for my software.
Many comments here that this "makes sense." Free does not make sense! If I'm not paying for it I'm not the customer anymore.
It’s not all free. It gets you in the door to then pay for the subscription to the AI features.
Also, that idea of “if you don’t pay, you’re the product” was a nice slogan but it isn’t true. Open-source software is free and respects you, while streaming services these days charge you money while serving you ads.
The open-source comparison is confused. Lots of open-source projects do offer optional commercial licenses or support contracts. And the truly free-as-in-beer projects either have some kind of grant financing or else the maintainer shoulders the costs until they burn out.
That "nice slogan" is emphatically true.
Makes sense to whom, exactly?
Free makes business sense when monetizing through business customers and AI subscriptions.
Conflating "this doesn't align with my preferences" with "this is objectively bad business strategy" assumes personal consumer expectations should dictate corporate viability. Those are different frames of reference.
Yep. Your art is now their training data. Their AI subscription today comes at the cost of your job tomorrow.
Does this read in ToS somewhere? I know many professional artists and if they would find out that their work is used for training, the app is uninstalled faster than it takes time for you to read this text.
It requires a Canva login now, so they'll smuggle it in through there. If it not already in the language it's inevitable because it's set up for enshittification now.
It says, on the actual website, the absolute opposite:
"Your content in Affinity isn’t used to train AI features — we can’t access local files. For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control. You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
The only nuance I can think of here is that if you are using the cloud AI tools, you are uploading content. But it's largely hypocritical to complain about AI tools being trained on your content. They were trained on everyone else's.
>2025
>believing anything a corporation says
Professionals I know don't want to use AI at all. So if Affinity is really not using the produced art for training, many artists will get a good tool for free.
> For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control.
IE: You're in control of what you upload. What happens after it's on their servers? What happens when they send it to a partner for processing?
The AI industry is filled with liars. It's basically "we're not using you data for training, that was a partner we pay that trained using your data." Good luck finding out who actually used your data for training when more than one company had access to it.
No, by "you're in control" they don't just mean that the control is whether or not you upload it. You've elided the other bit of that quote: "You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
They mean there are two privacy toggles that control it. They ask, you can change your answer.
> AI-powered features can learn and improve with your general usage
> When this setting is on, Canva and our trusted partners will use information about your general usage to help AI-powered features learn and improve. This includes how you interact and create with Canva products, but not your content.
> AI-powered features can learn and improve with your content
> We want to develop better AI features to help improve the way you create it in Canva. We have strict controls and policies in place to protect yours and your Team’s content when building AI, but we still won’t use it without your consent.
Beyond these, I don't know. Or really care, since I won't be using those tools.
Pretty bold claim. Do you have bold evidence?
That depends on whether they have anything to sell you. Like Da Vinci Resolve's free version, for example; they have something pro to sell you (and hardware).
Canva presumably see it the same way
"presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting
Is it? It's just saying I presume it. Is there another word that I can use that does less heavy lifting? Or did you just say that because it's the done thing to say?
Love to see this the day Adobe emailed to say it’s hiking my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription by 50% ($10/mo -> $15/mo)
I get this every single year. Just go on to their web site, call up a human agent on their chat and tell them it's too expensive. They have a ton of offers to get it back down to what you were paying before.
Better yet, don't ever pay for their software in the first place.
One of the reasons I stopped doing photography was that I realized I’m locked to using Lightroom where all my previous pictures are, and without a subscription it’s such a hassle to gain access to them again. I miss the days when I just bought Lightroom and that was it. :-(
https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW is rapidly going to be a nice cross-platform alternative to Lightroom
Capture One is fantastic, though.
One of the last 2 pieces of perpetual license pieces of photo software I have left. This software segment has almost entirely been consumed by subscriptions.
Yes but settings for any existing photos are non-transferable between different RAW editing systems, by design. Even different versions of the same software have to keep around all old code for compatibility.
For sure. But "less shitty than Adobe" isn't a life goal.
Did your email offer you the chance to pay yearly for $11/mo? Mine did, but I don't think the option to pay yearly exists.
I looove the fact that we can now seamlessly switch between the Photo, Designer, and Publisher modalities within a single program.
One of the great things about using the Affinity suite for the last few years has been the consistency of design conventions and key commands across all three programs, so of course it makes sense to merge them all!
Whereas Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign all have inherited different commands and conventions from their independent developments and are incongruent.
I'm so impressed by the workflow now. This feels like a tremendous win from a workflow standpoint.
Yeah I get the feeling everyone is talking about the AI stuff, but the majority of the launch talks about the actual _software_ they’re launching, and I really like it.
I’m happy for AI subscribers to subsidise my experience ;)
I was very surprised by this move, because the whole lingo while they were teasing it was giving me much worse vibes than what this ended up being about.
I paid for V1, paid again after they released V2 even though I was on Linux which they didn't support. I did it mostly out of support, and also because the community was making strides to get a decent wine setup working, so I would eventually get back to using it if I ever felt like it.
More diversity in creative software is always nice to have, and it's good to keep challenging the idea that "Adobe is dominant because it's the best solution". Tho I don't feel like Canva is quite the player I'd be rooting for either.
Fortunately, they seem to be handling the existing lifetime licenses a lot better than Autograph did when it got acquired by Maxon.
Overall I think I'm rooting for them. Good luck Affinity!
I must say this is a welcome relief from the overpriced Adobe monopoly which I, as a solo dev, simply can no longer justify.
The last suite with this name had a terrible UI. Canva also owns Leonardo which is pretty great so perhaps this will have a decent UI now that they've bought and revamped it.
Using this free desktop app requires Canva sign-in, ok fine, I can stomach that, it's free after all.
Signing in launches a browser to complete the sign-in process, but on macOS it launches Safari, not my OS default browser – this takes extra work to do over just using the `openUrl` call on macOS. Safari is blocked.
Thankfully something on my system redirects the URL opening to pass it to my orgs enforced browser, I sign-in, and then nothing happens. The page says it has launched Affinity, but Affinity is sitting there doing nothing waiting for me to log in.
I realise I'm on a somewhat non-standard setup, but an OAuth login flow is not hard to get right. I've built dozens of these flows in my career and messing it up this much is hard.
Edit:
> To report a bug within the application, click the "?" button in the top-right corner of the workspace. From the panel, select "Report a Bug".
This menu is not accessible until you have signed in. No other method of bug reporting is provided.
Thoughts on opensource alternatives?
- Inkscape is an obvious one --- there's also https://cenon.info/, perhaps Gravit Designer? Any word on Graphite.rs 's stand-alone desktop version?
- GIMP, Paint.net, Darktable and Krita
- Scribus or LaTeX or Typst
Haven't seen anything on Graphite.rs (site is still suggesting Q4 2025) but people on the Affinity Discord have been putting a lot of disgruntled new eyes on it.
Thanks for posting, I hadn't even heard of this
And Blender.
Yeah I know it sounds like a joke, but all Blender's icons are made in Blender, so it's officially an 2D vector graphics app too.
Most of Blender's icons are actually made in Penpot which is also what the Blender foundation uses for UI prototyping. The brush icons are made in Blender though!
https://penpot.app/penpothub/libraries-templates/blender-con...
https://code.blender.org/2024/11/new-brush-thumbnails/
Gravit Designer was sunset 9/1 of this year after the acquisition by Corel.
Paint.NET isn't open source, is it?
> GIMP
still no cmyk, and AFAIK text editing is almost worse than useless. not everybody's use case, but it keeps me spending 12.99 a month for PS.
I'm done with this. Open source only from here on out. You can't trust anyone in this day and age to turn not their products into AI pushing garbage.
Unfortunately there is no realistic vector drawing open source app for MacOS. Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag. LibreDraw is ok for very basic things. But that's about it.
> Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag.
?? I use Inkscape every day on macOS and it runs just fine, equivalent to on Windows/Linux. It was pretty bad a few years back but has caught up.
Same here.. I don't use it often, but it is fairly quick on my M2. It did have some mouse focus issues, you have to click around a bit more but that's okay-ish.
With anything remotely complicated I get lag on any clicks. Like 2s between a click and seeing anything get selected. Panning is unusable.
You can try Inkscape on Windows! It's the most crashy software I've used. It's crazy because I use Houdini and Blender, both far more complicated apps than Inkscape and they crash less.
(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)
Well, if Apple did something about it... We would at least have some half-assed thing that would look good in commercials.
Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.
I see that there is Pixelmator ($50) and Photomator ($120), both from Apple.
Any idea what the difference is? The cheaper one looks more capable.
Pixelmator = Photoshop
Photomator = Lightroom, but without the library management
I'm going to hold on my Affinity as long as I can and try to integrate as much of my workflow to Inkscape as possible (even if UI feels like CorelDraw). Also keeping eye on: https://graphite.rs/
For context: I own licenses for both Affinity Designer, and the full Affinity 2 suite.
Just tried the new affinity application for a couple hours and it's pretty great. Personas are now studios and as far as I can tell features from all apps are now integrated into one.
Giving this away for free is insane value and I am very glad to have this as a photoshop alternative.
Did they remove any features in Photo? Or is it basically just glommed together?
Looks complete to me.
It seems that the Affinity apps are removed from the Mac App Store? That would be a shame, because they are sandboxed. I don't want yet another app with unfettered access. Of course, I can still download them from my purchases, but I think there will be no updates anymore?
Yeah, I used to use the app store version of Slack because it was sandboxed. (I later switched to having Safari run it as a web application.) Even if I trusted them, the sandbox would be a layer of protection against bugs.
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
Developers can still choose to enable sandbox for apps delivered outside of App Store. Some of them simply choose to not do so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/hardened-...
s/some/most/
Sadly.
For those that don't know, an easy way to check is to right-click a column in Activity Monitor and enable the Sandbox column.
Been curious what the Oct 10 announcement would be. It seemed most likely an acquisition since they wanted enough time of not selling existing products to avoid dealing with a month of refunds. Appears Canva bought with it now being a single app that is "free" but paid for premium features. While many may rejoice at a solid free options it's certainly an unfortunate day for those who rely on it. As Canva makes money on people using the paid version so attention will be at making that version more enticing over time and free less. If people all just used the free and not the premium for AI, then they would either start charging for the "free" version or take away features from the free version to make the "choice" easier to upgrade. All in all good for Canva, and good for more casual users who can jump ship any time to free options but would be quite worrisome for those who have looked towards Affinity as the alternative to Adobe.
Canva acquired Affinity year and half back - Mar 2024.
https://www.canva.com/en_in/newsroom/news/affinity/
So did they buy Affinity and all their tools and gave it for free?
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/
Yep, but dont expect the level of quality development that was there before. These'free' tools are to attract you to buy ai. They are now only selling tools. Serif were pushing to beat Adobe at their own game and make the best designer tools available. Canva are just trying to sell you ai.
So why has Canva been giving massive amounts of their quality development away for free for over 10 years?
Interesting. Yes, the pro features seem to be just about ai these days. I used affinity’s indesign equivalent while at work and it was quite good. I wonder what the business model is? Same as figma a while back?
Awesome—I even used to pay for it.
This is a sad day, but it was obvious something horrible would happen, since they had pulled the products with zero communication, such a user hostile move to remove products for a month.
I too would really like a linux version of this
If you're not paying, you are the product.
“Even if you are paying, you are the premium product.”
I think we need to stop saying that quote since the existence of subscription. Can you stop Google from tracking you or let you define your “algorithm” if you have purchased YouTube Premium and one of the Google Drive plans? I really doubt.
I think it is the value of the company matters. If their intentions is to keep investors happy, the users are always the product no matter paying or not. By contrast, there are quite a lot of free open source software doing the same for free, but the users still remain user.
There is a premium plan for the AI features, so that's the strategy, which does make some sense, I bet a lot of people will want to have those features.
Good software is never freemium. It is either paid upfront or it is a timebomb. I am okay with keeping things proprietary and asking for a fair price. Once free-to-play is introduced, the software is gone for good.
I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it
This sucks. But it also means the door is open for yet another person to come along and make one-time purchase Vector/Pixel/Layout apps.
Let's aquire software that people love using... and then kill what they love about it!!
We have to understand that we're a minority and they're after another market. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.
The goal is to kill the product, so people are forced to pay for Canva
If a product is free, the user is the product.
Why the account tie? Will it phone home to train yet another AI model on my image editing workflows? Will it work air-gapped?
I hope the older versions (V2) will be maintained for a while… I can't help but worry about the upcoming ensh*ttification — I think it's inevitable that some day some exec at this now large company will come up with innovative ideas for "monetizing those free users" and things will go down the drain as usual.
I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
Nope. No more updates and it's removed from the app stores.
Mixed feelings about this. The apps were great and it's always uncomfortable when the future becomes uncertain due to a big acquisition. So far, it seems it could've gone worse. Their business model makes sense. I like that everything got integrated now, because Photo, Designer and Publisher being separate with so much overlap didn't feel natural. Hate the new logo, though... Some elegance was definitely lost.
This seems … way better than what I expected following the acquisition? What am I missing?
And I assume this is a supplement to (and not a replacement of) the existing Affinity applications?
It is a replacement, the old Affinity apps are discontinued:
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates.
"For the best experience, we recommend using the new Affinity by Canva app."
As someone who just bought V2 I am worried that V2 uses an activation server at all unlike V1 with its license key.
When this free/premium with AI thing crash and burn in a few years I can kiss that license goodbye.
I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.
I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).
You should log in and download the offline copy of your license key and store it in order to safeguard such things.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be a thing for V2
Oh, that’s a shame. I liked those programs.
New corollary to the maxim, "If it's free, you're the product":
"If the paid version can no longer be purchased, the 'free' version WILL be neutered."
They have to remove the option to compare the free, paid, and subscription versions.
It looks like the pro version includes all the AI features. The free one is for "proper" artists ;)
I'm confused...this is not the same as Affinity Studio from Serif? Or it is? Their website shows something new: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/
This site seems to be the old one - they don't mention their acquistion by Canva in 'About Us' section.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/
Also there is no link anywhere for downloading their products.
The current site seems to what OP has posted: affinity.studio
Strange choice to keep the old site up and running, and to complicate things the old site is the top result when searched.
It looks like that's fixed now. It redirects to affinity.studio for me.
OK, there is a link to the Affinity Serif product on the Canva website as Affinity V2. Looks like an acquisition
Yeah Canva bought them out over a year ago, but it was business as usual until now.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
Holy shit good for them in that case! Affinity was always a great company with a great product.
Well, that's annoying as I bought a licence about 6 months ago.
They've missed a trick so far not making a Linux version. People have been crying out for ages that Adobe never made a Linux version of Photoshop, and with the whole Windows 11 debacle now and people shifting over it would make perfect sense.
We see that people people love you Affinity software! Lets buy it and stop doing what people love about it!
I don't understand this thread at all. I think this is the first time I have seen a thread that talks about something requiring a new account be created at some company, and a nonsensical major change to a product (merging the products into one, optional subscriptions) where the majority of people seem to be saying "thats ok and good luck" to the company. Worse, people who are upset this has happened to software they liked are getting downvoted. These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
It feels like the thread is being astroturfed.
They removed our software that we paid for from the Mac Store, and everyone is just like "thats fine, good move canva". Serif did a great job of keeping their software working through macOS major version updates. It's another reason many of us paid for their software. That's gone, and people are just cheering them on. It's very confusing.
Plenty of people in this thread mourning the loss of the only real competitor to Adobe in the design space.
This is indeed a sad day.
Seems like it's,
- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?
- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)
- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)
For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.
I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.
> These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
Have you used it yet? It's a very elegant implementation. I, for one, am very excited about the workflow advantages of being able to easily switch between all three modalities with a click.
I'm feeling some real hurt seeing this announcement.
I bought the Affinity v1 apps, buying into the vision for a no-BS forever app.
I was surprised to see a v2 app show up a year after I bought into v1 with what I remember was something like a 25% discount. But this was going to be the new forever app, and I understand wanting to get things right on a second pass.
Reading about how v2 will no longer get updates just makes me see red.
You bought a one time license and the app still works, what's the issue? You can't expect to pay $70 for perpetual software.
Well this puts them on my blacklist. And I am an educator in precisely the artschool they would profit off catering to.
I refuse to teach my student tools that change the contract once you bought into them.
Adobe is on that list too.
The only major non-open source software that isn't is anything by Black Magic or Steam, both companies that have found healthy sustainable business models and jave acted reliable towards creaters and the open source community they relied on in their humbe beginnings.
They didn’t change anything about the software you bought? It still functions like it did the day you bought it.
I'm daily user of the old 3-piece suite, should I be worried they will be taken away from me in the near future?
Arf, and me who was hitting that "update later button", now I wish I had updated to the latest version before the removal from the store.
That said, I'll try this when it will become necessary. Affinity tools were great. I downloaded the new Canva version, and although I'm not a fan of the new icons and general look and feel it seems okay. It feels a bit less responsive than the v2, that might be fixed with some "bug fixes & small improvements" releases. I might be just jaded and resigned.
Edit: Actually it is still possible to update.
This is bad news... I liked the Publisher/Designer/Photo apps on my Mac. The presentation of this new 'Canva' acquired product feels like a circus, and roadmap is very unclear also. This feels like it will be the end of a none adobe solution.
Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.
That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.
Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible
In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.
I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
I loved Affinity v1 suite's offline activation model. Sadly that changed in v2 and the same thing is happening now.
Is there any hope to enable activating v2 offline? That way I can still install and use it when you eventually shutdown the activation server.
I understand why this is important. I’ll try my best to see what we can do :) Thank you for the great feedback.
It would be great to patch the v2 apps into an "offline mode." Then you don't have to worry about maintaining the license servers.
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
We don't believe you.
I've used free Canva and premium Canva on and off for years. Based on their track record, I'm keeping an open mind.
Will we still be able to use our paid license without having to connect it to a Canva account?
>We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
Open source it, then.
Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.
There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.
And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.
Publisher was already the combined version, kind-of. I never needed that one but it has the three personas.
Just a reminder you can keep using your Affinity V2 apps. They run just fine on macOS 26.
The real concern… will our V2 apps run on macOS 27 or macOS 28?
I know no new features will be added to V2—what about bug fixes and security updates?
Circus? And why do you think you payed for nothing?
Looks like they unified Designer/Photo/Publisher into one app, will take a bit to to get used to, but overall nice, the split between Photo & Designer was always a bit silly I feel. Also added GenAI features, for $12/m, not in a hurry to subscribe atm, but could come in handy. Cool to see the suite is still alive and getting updates.
it's fair to be very worried about the future of the apps, but this:
> Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
is ridiculous. you (and I) paid for upgrades for software we liked, and then in exchange for that money got upgrades to said software.
it's completely ridiculous for you to now whinge about this particular thing.
I can understand your confusion – possible anger - with my remark. But you take my answer too literally. I paid for it without regret, because I liked the software. But now it feels as a dead end so all those efforts for nothing... in the end it is a waste of both time investment and money. Cheers.
so basically there's no more incentive to maintain or improve the affinity suite..
Yep, the design side of the software will rot and die.
Except their competitors? Why do you think Canva bought them?
Nothing is free. I think we've all learned that by now. AI issues aside, think about the data you're locking forever when switching to Affinity. As much as we all hate Adobe, their formats are at least reverse-engineered and their specs published. With Canva's new free toy, you don't get that luxury. All of your work and data are basically locked forever in their proprietary format that no open-source software can read. So it's really up to Canva to decide for how long you get to play for free and under what rules.
IF the new app truly has all the features of V1 and V2 of the affinity apps. And IF it's truly free. Would it would damn sure be nice of them remove the license requirement from the V1 and V2 versions which I both bought and loved. And let users continue to enjoy these pieces of software for years to come without having to sign up for this new program which I don't trust at all. I've used and loved it for close to 10 years now. And it's fantastic software. But I just can't trust software without a proper non-subscription business model. I'm not going back to fucking Adobe and it's ilk.
I can't find the "Pricing" button on the webpage anywhere.
I don't want "Free", I want a situation where I can buy and own a perpetual license for the software.
Yet after decades, Gimp still can't compete even with programs built from scratch :D
GIMP is open source if you want to go help improve it ;)
I tried ;) GIMP developers aren't very open to external contributions. I don't consider my attempts to be of low quality either, but the bike shedding resulted in them never being accepted. "It's best to wait until X lands" or "I think this will be part of Y".
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
Yeah, I was mostly being facetious haha. I know that GIMP as a project is notoriously difficult to contribute to.
If it works well enough for the people who use it, why does it matter?
It doesn’t work well enough for the people who use it; false assumption. I use it, and it’s a cludge that I resent every time I have no other option.
Won't this end up how Draftsight did? (Free for years but required user details, and then Dassault decided to disable each and every free installation and require a subscription)
Oh this is so sad. I was literally trying to buy a license for Photo the other day and confused as to why. I don’t want a Canva license I don’t want a bloody subscription
I'm surprised people aren't really talking about how this affects Adobe going into the future. Adobe frankly has been hostile to it's users for the past while, this should really shake up the game. Creatives now have access to a pro-level tool for free with the option to pay extra for AI features. This is a clear shot across Adobe's bow and positions Canva to control the creative vertical from professionals to the average person.
Really wish they'd do a Linux version... Even an app image or flatpak bundled with working wine would be nice to see.
Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".
I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.
[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.
Absolutely. "free" tier is just to grow a userbase with mandatory accounts.
Give it some time and suddenly that free tier shrinks or requires a subscription to continue.
The complaining is off the charts! Nothing in your life would have changed if you hadn't heard about this free product. Now you rest sleepless and grind your teeth because other people get to enjoy free high quality software.
Don't worry, I sleep tight and don't grind my teeth (at least not over Affinity).
What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.
I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)
They already were deprecating the original Serif suite, since it was clearly in part an acquihire.
You bought those licenses with terms that you preferred and those terms are being honored so it seems like everything worked well.
I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.
And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.
Yes, it did change: I want to use the old apps and I don't want to use a Canva account. I can still use them, but will never get any updates any more.
Nothing changed: you can still use the apps you purchased, as they were when you purchased them? That's the whole point of one time purchases.
What you can or cannot get in the future is purely hypothetical and nobody owes you anything at all.
What? How is selling a product with the promise of future updates under the same terms not owing us something? This is not some FOSS project we're taking about here.
bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.
also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
Your perpetual license is still valid for the v2 suite. Nothing was swapped - the product you paid for is no longer getting updates.
Just because people have been asking for features doesn't mean your perpetual license is owed those features??? That's an incredible amount of entitlement.
Linux version when
Indeed. Although I suspect Wine or proton could be an option - not checked.
There's a custom patched wine that can run version 1 reasonably well, and efforts were ongoing for version 2. Haven't really tried it since I'm not a artist. https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
Older versions historically haven’t worked very well, but I’ve not tried with newer copies.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux is being updated to reflect the v3 but it does work
Yeah I use this.
- V1 has some rendering issue on my work machine (haven't updated it in a bit, could have been fixed)
- V2 mostly works well on my home machine, some crashes
Overall wouldn't use it for work but for small edits it's fine.
I own Affinity products and I used to be able to login to Serif's site to download them. Now that download link seems to have gone. I wish I had archived those images. Not sure if they would keep working though.
You still can, or at least I can.
https://store.serif.com/en-us/account/
After login it forwarded me to the new site, but going back has orders, v2 downloads, and stuff.
kind of fun that their fonts are Affinity Serif and Canva Sans
You can link your V2 store purchases by signing into the app, clicking the dropdown with your name in the top left of the popup window, and clicking on the "Advanced" dropdown
I don't like the new UI. It feels dumbed down.
Well. It can now be considered as pure trash. Goodbye, Affinity.
I'm not disappointed at how far Affinity has pushed the baseline for graphic design software up until this point for me with V1 and V2. I'll stay tentatively hopeful that we don't see this backslide in V3 even though i'm not expecting the same development velocity for new baseline features outside of the subscription now.
I'm not that hopeful though.. with freemium, everything is subject to be clawed back slowly into a subscription if the subscription offering fails to perform well enough.
Wow, completely free? I wonder how the team plans look like, seems like you need to contact them even for single digit seat counts.
An UI design tab next please, some more players in that space would be nice.
Yeah I can actually cancel my pro plan now, dont think I need the AI Feature, let's see
Are there any alternatives out there that are still subscription-free and AI-free?
And since it will be a freemium model or ad-supported, here comes one more example why we should use and support free software.
As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example.
Edit: Just checked out the app. They essentially put Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher together in one app, switchable from a tab. Honestly, it's executed well. I hope it stays free—these apps are legitimately useful replacements for their Adobe equivalents.
I was skeptical about the all-in-one but it's executed really well, to the point that now I really want Adobe to do the same thing for Lightroom (Classic) and Photoshop.
Would be great to be able to switch between them on the same photo with tabs in one app. LR already uses ACR as the backend.
I 100% agree. It feels so clunky to do the LR -> PS -> LR roundtrip!
Combining vector and raster editors makes some amount of sense since the raster editor had some vector capabilities anyway, but yeah, tossing in layout/desktop publishing feels kind of weird. It's a bit like combining a microwave oven and a blender.
Combining a microwave oven and a blender, you say? They already did that: https://www.thermomix.com
DTP is basically vector editing with an emphasis on text boxes.
It looks very similar to what they already had. If you had all three they all were already integrated, you can just switch between the different types of editing modes.
This is well timed as my wife has lost her educator status, and we've canceled Adobe Creative Cloud this month as we can't stomach the jump from £400 to £800/yr.
I expressly bought this software (Designer, Photo, Publisher) out of principle, against Adobe's enshittification and monopolisation, and because it was premised on "pay once; own it forever".
This is obviously the 'tech circle of life' in action, but... how depressing...
I've always been guilty of preaching market diversification but sticking with the big(ger) players, but this sort of thing illustrates the need for multiple, viable players that all have good market share, so that – whenever one gets cannibalised and debased into some VC-money-addled marketing funnel – there are others to which people can flock in support/protest
Unlisted video sent by e-mail to those who subscribed on that mysterious page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP_TBaKODlw
AI has now devoured humanity, and not even with entertainment if it was in a proper dystopian way. It's just engorging all the software products we love, accelerating enshitiffication. We just get another fucking subscription. Why can't we have killer robots to fight instead?
On first impression it feels wonky. I have v2 installed for Photo, Design and Publisher and they all feel much better to work with. I guess I can count my blessings and at least be grateful that it's not yet another Electron clusterfuck a la New Outlook
Nooooooo!
I'm a loyal Serif customer and paid for their software. I LOVE Affinity. And I HATE "free" commercial products because they need to extract revenue from subscription services, ads, data selling etc.
This is the first step toward making Affinity become another rental application like Photoshop. Escaping Adobe's predatory business model is exactly why I became a Serif customer in the first place.
I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva.
This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription.
I understand why you feel that way. Having being involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.
> explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
> I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
I actually can't but I'd welcome hearing more about the strategy. I suspect what you're alluding to is maybe an open-core model? Generate free value for the entire ecosystem and then capture a portion of it with value-adding paid features? I'd be interested in that but I don't see where the FOSS layer is here.
> I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding
I also want to do mission-driven and moral work in the tech industry but I think there may be a disconnect between how the general population sees the tech industry and how it sees itself. This is my motivation to make these comments; not to be antagonistic and unpleasant for no reason but to attempt to hold up a mirror and show the tech industry the crisis of confidence that it faces. It would be like Philip Morris - after decades of subverting science and pushing cigarettes - launching a vape and expecting to receive the benefit of the doubt that the product has no downsides. Gone are the days of Silicon Valley being the warm and cuddly companies saving the world from their beanbags and open concept offices.
> a macro and game-theory perspective
bro you _need_ to log off
You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.
What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.
> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?
Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.
Did that stop Adobe moving towards a subscription model?
People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.
>> "What exactly do you expect from them?"
Nothing. No one asked for Canva. The acquisition is an imposition by a company that has not earned the trust we had in Serif.
You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.
It might be the plan now - but it only takes one Product Manager in 18 months who is looking to push a metric
It's also concerning that you have to be logged in to use a free native app
You have to log in at first download — how else would you make a free app generate any business?
You evidently do not need to be logged in to subsequently start it up. You don't even have to be on the network.
(I have tested this)
Maybe today but what about 12-24 months from now?
You will need to build a lot of trust in the next couple of years.
Personally I lost faith in Affinity after waiting for a decade for a feature requested dozena of times in the forum (group isolation in Designer).
Why is an account necessary then? Stop saying it's free when it's not.
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
Affinity Photo 2 has a few offline AI features already. You download a model for offline use.
There is an on device background remover included for free
Respect the love and the vision, yet don't forget Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy <3 Available to consult with mgmt on how to fight the law ;)
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.
This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.
This is like when a dog is harassing me and the owner yells "he won't bite! I know my dog!"
I don't know you.
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.
Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
Look at it this way, this could challenge Adobe to make Creative Suite free and charge only for AI in their product (one can dream at least).
Not a chance - Adobe is too much of an industry standard.
Lotus 1-2-3 was once an industry standard.
One could dream.
But hey, anything that puts pressure on Adobe and makes them sweat a little is a win in my book. Fuck them.
Now, if maybe Apple would actually do something with their Pixelmator acquisition and re-release aperture, both Apple and Canva/Affinity can start going after Adobe.
When somethings free, I’m suspicious.
If its a local-first app, that could be very good! Even if browser+WASM with local storage that is a step up from web apps.
I don't like companies hoovering all data.
How long before that's no longer the case?
Only way to be sure it will never change is to build it yourself and make it free for everyone forever!
Though even if you build it, someone might eventually make you an offer you cannot refuse.
You can always refuse offers. Plenty of people enjoy working long hours and answering endless customer support issues for no revenue. Well, there must be someone out there.
Is this built with JS / something like Fabric JS? There are some things that feel very similar to a web app that I worked on before. Wondering if there's plans to have a plugin API at some point if it is.
There is support for photoshop plugins https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pag...
Freeium mostly sucks. Escape before they squeeze every drop of blood out of you. There is a cost to everything that is how the reality get's in.
Interesting move by this company to expand into the creative suite space...
BUT I'm curious how they'll handle interoperability with existing workflows... Are there import/export paths for PSD, Sketch, Figma... Without that it's just another silo...
ALSO for freelancers and small teams licensing models matter... a subscription tied to an account can be a hurdle if you need to collaborate with clients outside the ecosystem...
Would love to see more clarity on offline use, local file formats and plugin APIs... those details make or break a creative suite...
>Your PSDs are welcome here
>Import PSDs, AIs, IDMLs, DWGs, and other file types into Affinity, with structure, layers, and creative intent preserved.
I think for now, they will be fine with solo. for small businesses
Why did they force the use of Safari to sign into the app? What's the disrespect with the user's browser of choice (and one that already has the valid token)?
There is no code in Canva that specifically opens Safari, it would be a `ASWebAuthenticationSession` from macOS.
Safari is used by default, other browsers have to support this feature to use it and do not, so you just get Safari.
Yeah this is driving me crazy. It must be a bug because it says "a new tab has been opened in your default browser" but my default browser is not Safari.
Well, time to donate more money to Krita, Inkscape, etc.
I'm not sure that's good news actually.
If you're not the customer - you're the product.
Does anyone know what will happen with Affinity for iOS?
The current apps are all released by Serif but have been made fully free recentyly.
So discontinued or what? Would be a real tragedy if it is...
It was mentioned in the release video that it’ll be a single app to come out next year.
Oh great, I just finished my year long move from Photoshop to Affinity Photo…
Now I have to start over again? Ugghhh…
…and they still don't have proper Devanagari support.
I was just looking yesterday for a simple vector editor, will give it a try. Sorry, Inkscape is a total mess to use.
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.
1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.
2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!
3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.
It's textbook at this point.
So basically "Canva Desktop"?
Any app that requires an account just to run a totally-local app, is also a company that can unilaterally deny your ability to run said software on your own computer for whatever reason they want.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If I install it, it should be mine to do whatever the hell I want to do with it, online OR OFFLINE.
Their FAQ says that the account and online access are needed for the download and license activation, but after that it can be run offline.
If possible, please make a Linux version.
Just in case any Canva engineer is reading this.
I just want to buy a product and not have it constantly upsell me. Like what Affinity was before. Please.
But how will the company “maximize shareholder value” then?
I would have rather paid for this product as is and kept paying.
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.
I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.
Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
On Mac, the app size when installed is 3.5GB!?? How can we get such a size?
I have:
- Affinity Designer 2 — 2.88 GB
- Affinity Photo 2 — 2.81 GB
+ publisher (don't have it)
So... smaller than both of them :)
Seems much better than was feared, though I haven't yet downloaded and tried the new version and there's still plenty of room for things to decay in the future.
It requiring an account (and thus, internet connectivity) to use is offputting, though. That is a prime enabler of enshittification, since it allows Canva to force updates that users may not necessarily desire. Hopefully it's easy to reverse engineer so old versions can be preserved and remain functional.
I do hope you can still use it without internet. Otherwise the program is much less interesting.
You can use it without internet after the first signin!
Can't figure out if any new non-AI features were added?
I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.
This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(
The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."
Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!
So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.
> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model
They explicitly promised they wouldn’t switch to a subscription model, during the acquisition.
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
Whether that is true is another thing altogether.
Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.
> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model
> to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them
Your license is perpetual for V2, so I wouldn't worry that you'll lose access to it?
What client-side features do you use that you think will get ripped out and paywalled from an old version?
Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.
My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"
- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.
- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.
Do you find CD-Keys that round-trip one time, ever to be a violation of a perpetual license? That’s effectively what “login to an account” means - especially if it works offline forever, afterward. (I haven’t checked if it does, in this case)
If it's a one-time license validation, no. That's fine. If it's "login every time to be able to use the app" then that is something that, while is not necessarily a deal breaker in all cases, really annoys me.
Right so people who said they were going to merge the products together and release it free where right on the money.
It being free means it'll eventually get enshittified though.
Oh well, I just bought V2. What worries me however is that it already used an account instead of a license key like V1...
Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.
I'm so sick of sellouts.
so this means that the linux-wine version will not stop working after some random update i assume?
wow, if they add Good Enough™ video editing I can probably cancel my Adobe CC subscription
Side/relevant (?) note, earlier this month, serif had made affinity free (at least for iPad if not for others as well). Many had speculated a v3 or something coming up… but I suppose “everything is free” is pretty nice too?
(Idk why everyone’s disappointed, it seems clear that canvas hopes the AI is good enough to get people to fork over their money. That’s… alright, as of now?)
disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.
I think that distinction matters.
> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?
I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?
(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)
not just identical, the new "free" thing will have more. popular requests like image trace and vector blend go to the "free" but not v2 (which, on its own is understandable tbh, no one expects a one time purchase of v2 to improve for eternity)
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.
The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
Support open source projects with donations and contributions
I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.
Can you recommend any?
i would gladly pay $500 for GIMP if i felt their developers would prioritize features that i actually need out of an image manipulation program. they never have and by the looks of things, they never will. it's too bad.
More TelemetryWare? No thanks!
Isn't everyone using Rive these days?
Sooo, the main reason we looked at Affinity as an alternative to the Adobe suite was the fact that it was a one-time purchase without forced updates or all the extra garbage Adobe obsessively adds that slows down each new version. Affinity was nice but just not quite there, in my opinion, as a daily driver for print design and pre-press.
Once they were bought by Canva, whose software I find atrocious, I gave up on it.
My problem with this is that it seems like a gateway to being forced to pay monthly, Adobe-style. Or else what they're really selling are the AI tools. Just sell me a solid piece of software I can keep using forever offline. I can still do all my design work in Illustrator CS6 if I want to haul out a 15 year old laptop. Sell me a version of that for Apple Silicon and I'll happily pay for it.
Ran it for the first time, already made 16 network requests. [1] Not too bad at all.
[1] https://ibb.co/RkVgBFGw
Another one bites the dust.
They seem to have removed Affinity from the Mac App Store.
For those who want a lifetime license instead of freemium, Amandine* is similar to Affinity ($30 on Mac Store).
(I have no connection to either app).
* Edit: It's Amadine, not Amandine (my typo)
And if you want just a photo editor, not a vector software, I really recommend Pixelmator Pro. I've had it and Affinity Photo for years, but I find myself sticking with Pixelmator more often than not.
I got interested in Pixelmator Pro after Canva acquired Affinity, and then lost interest again when Apple bought them. They aren’t exactly good stewards of their own pro apps.
Apple bought Pixelmator. What is it's future?
Possibly free also.
I have been curious about Amadine for a few years, but honestly at this point it feels that if I’m going to invest any time in learning a new vector drawing tool (for like the fourth or fifth time), it’s probably a good idea to try Inkscape first. They were working on Affinity Designer file imports a few versions back.
Great tip, will give that a try! To find it in the Mac Appstore it is called 'Amadine' (without the 'n') It seems alright at first glance, thanks again for this tip.
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
If I have to "sign up" then I don't really consider it free. Maybe still a good deal for some who need it, but I won't casually try this out like I would if I could just do it anonymously.
This is a good rule of thumb
The entire popularity of Affinity was licenses you could buy once and use forever and not have subscriptions or anything over you.
Now it's "free" with an account and an optional subscription. Basically the opposite of why everyone supported them. Good luck, folks.
seems like Canva want to take adobe market share
>Affinity Studio now free
I'd love to have an actually free alternative to the offerings from those rapacious thugs over at Adobe.
/RANT
But this isn't actually free. Rather than paying with currency, you pay with your PII and, presumably, your attention as you're relentlessly marketed to by Canva and by whomever they decide to sell your PII.
This is all too common and folks seem to be okay with it for some unknown reason. If you walked into an art supply store, grabbed the stuff you wanted/needed and headed to the cashier with cash and they refused to sell you anything unless you provided them with your name, phone number, email address, etc., etc., etc. you'd likely walk out without purchasing anything. [N.B.: Yes, Radio Shack always asked for that info, but didn't require it for purchases.]
Yet it seems that selling your personal details and attention is perfectly fine online.
What's more, since you must have a valid "account" with Canva to use their "free" offering, you are also subject (generally without recourse) to changes in the licensing/subscription models and they can take it away whenever they feel like it. What could go wrong? It's not like that's ever been an issue, right?
I'd love to use Affinity Studio. But I won't. Because the price is too high for me.
I'd note that these sorts of shenanigans aren't limited to Canva -- far from it. It's just one more vendor contributing to the further enshittification of the tech sphere. And more's the pity.
/RANT
Why is/isn't it too "expensive" for you? (Note, this is a real question, not a poke at anyone.)
Edit: Fixed prose. Added to rant.
https://downloads.affinity.studio/Affinity.dmg
thank me later.
You still need an account to start the app, so the direct download doesn’t really save any effort.
That's right, thanks for pointing this out.
I got the email just now about this. I was happy to pay real money for good software as I had done for Affinity V1 and would have upgraded to V3… but now it’s free because we are the business now.
With a big dollop of AI slop on top.
Every single time some acquisition happens, this happens.
I am more than happy to pay good money for quality software to support a business so it doesn’t need to resort to this. Even a monthly subscription would have been preferable.
That is fantastic. Paid for the affinity products when they first came out.
Absolutely great product, I hate Adobe with a passion you wouldn’t believe.
The only problem is in time it will probably become paid, as most things do. Oh well, then I’ll just uninstall.
If you hate Adobe, why feel positively about them starting down the same path?
tldr;
It is all apps combined in one. It is free. Requires Canva account. AI features require Canva Premium subscription. No iPad app (yet). Still missing RTL support.
what people actually want: to pay the ridiculously cheap $20/mo or whatever it is for Photoshop, but to use whichever backend they want for generative AI, not the other way around.
I think you made a typo spelling “I”
can't believe this. once paid $50 - but still a steal at that price.
now glad people can unleash their creativity.
>Sign up to download
Into the trash it goes.
You really like to say that, don't you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45707186
Doesn’t even make sense. If you need an account to download, then before you make the account there is nothing to trash.
I opened an SVG file, copy-pasted a shape, exported the file and the new shape was wrapped in a transform tag, which was absolutely unnecessary. Won't be using this.
Once there was a great app, Gravit Designer. It produced the cleanest SVG markup. Too bad Corel murdered it.
Well, I downloaded the Mac app, and here's what I don't like:
- Goodness gracious, that icon. And 3.5GB?????
- Requires a login (so I suppose no disconnected operation)
- Seems to jumble together the vector, bitmap and publishing apps (which I very much prefer to have as separate things)
Mostly everything I've been able to try in 30 minutes seems to work, but a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times.
Will most likely keep using the old versions until they die on me, especially on the iPad.
> a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times.
It's par for the course, Illustrator 2025 is 2.8 gigs on my Mac for just the binary, 3.29 gigs for its directory in /Applications for some of its support files, plus however much space it takes up in ~/Library for more of its support files.
Photoshop's another 4.8 gigs for its binary and InDesign's another 2, so Affinity's doing pretty well to get some part of the functionality of all of those in a mere 3.5 gigs. Or Adobe's hilariously bloated. Or both. Let's go with both, really.
> so I suppose no disconnected operation)
You're wrong about that point, it works offline just fine after activation. It's even stated in their FAQ. Of course it's possible for them to change that at any time.
It’s because it’s four apps in one, they merged the affinity suite apps then added their own ai app too
Fine, but the Mac mini I downloaded this in has very little internal storage, so I am not using this and will only keep the old designer and publisher apps around (Pixelmator is better for my use case)
Can I work in more than one app at the same time?