Serif is the company that originally built this software.
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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.
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2024
Canva acquired Serif.
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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!
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.
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)
It's a classic "commoditize your complements" play. Canva remains profitable without charging for Affinity, but Adobe can't stay profitable if they stop charging for Photoshop/Illustrator.
The business justification works without imputing any more sinister motives than that.
>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.
Which software is that? I can only think about either the open source codec or the LLM from Anthropic.
This must be some kind of Ponzi scheme, I guess they must count on
1. storage getting cheaper 2. traffic getting cheaper 3. that people will need more and more storage with time
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.
I was curious too. The FAQ says this:
> Yes, Affinity really is free. That doesn’t mean you’re getting a watered-down version of the app though. You can use every tool in the Pixel, Vector, and Layout studios, plus all of the customization and export features, as much as you want, with no restrictions or payment needed. The app will also receive free updates with new features and improvements added.
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.
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.
There is a lot of unchecked hype, but that doesn't mean there is no substance.
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.
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". :-)
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!
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.
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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.)
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.
The only ”safer” bets are the biggest projects providing critical infra for segments of economy like python for example.
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 don't know how it compares to QuarkXpress, but it's a pretty good commercial replacement for InDesign / Publisher in my personal opinion: it has decent typography, styles, and good options for PDF/X-4 export (with FOGRA39 as a destination etc). I've also successfully imported .idml
They have various perpetual / subscription options (I'm on a commercial perpetual licence), a decent trial version, and they even do a Linux version, which works great for me on Mageia9.
I've contacted their support a few times, and they've been very responsive, professional and helpful, which was a pleasant surprise.
There really is none, at least not that is comparable. InDesign is perhaps the one product where Adobe really shines.
Aldus PageMaker and Quark XPress were worthy predecessors; I used both back in the day, but Adobe bought PageMaker and discontinued it. As for Quark, not sure what happened to them but they're not around anymore.
Took many years for the transition to happen, but a lot of people in my circle wanted to see the back of Quark.
They added non-destructive adjustment layers in gimp version 3.0 that can do the same
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.
If they can't monetize the product with ai subscriptions they sure as hell will end up monetizing their users and their content.
There's clearly a funnel for Canva Pro upgrades, but (to my knowledge) they've never paywalled formerly-free features, and it seems to be a profitable strategy so far.
I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.
Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium 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.
Yes, you can add on additional AI if you want it. But, the product is not at all limited in features. It is a complete product, 100% of what we were paying for before, now for free, plus new features, also free.
I would define it more like a lost-leader than freemium.
Thank you, Canva.
If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
(I don't know much about Affinity suite)
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".
It quite literally always always does.
it is same thing we keep hearing for about a decade now how "recession is imminent" which of course it'll eventually happen, it always does, you just have to predict it for 10-15 years and one day you'll be right... same thing with this "bubble" - there will eventually be a "pull back" - prolonged capex of this magnitude is not something any company will do but it is getting so boring here on HN hearing about this amazing 'bubble' that is about to pop and we just keep sitting and waiting for this magical moment while the companies, in a very, very, very bad economy are crushing earnings...
they always do
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.
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)
Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.
All of that could get added to affinity without changing its core offering, which would be consistent with both their past strategy and their current messaging.
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.
A company that hasn’t sold out is Adobe— are we in love with Adobe?
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 ...).
If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
Either way, trying to place blame on individual people is kind of silly.
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.
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…
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
(I did investigate open source tools back in 2011 but essentially no libraries could even decode the raw format my camera uses for years)
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.
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.
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.
But I realize that’s less lucrative and not how modern software tends to work
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.
A one time license is sold on the promise of future updates perpetually to this version. If serif said “we’re not adding AI tools to v2, we’re going to go to v3 instead” I’d be fine with it. But instead they’re taking the updates they were providing to us anyway and packaging them up under a new revenue stream.
If they didn’t want this backlash they shouldn’t have sold perpetual licenses, they should have sold licenses with 1 year of updates.
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.
you know what would fix this? releasing a v3. that was the whole sell with affinity suite. that i could buy the new v3 for whatever price they set, it will contain all the new features. and i will own v3 for whatever that product lifecycle is.
THAT is why people invested in affinity. money is almost immaterial but that's why i spent time learning the thing and making it a part of my workflow.
affinity/canva can release free software all they want, but the whole reason affinity was popular was that people could pay 160 or whatever dollars for it to not nag, never nag. that has disappeared under the misdirection of "hey look its free for everyone now"
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.
I don’t even mind paying a subscription but the adobe option requires you to get a minimum of 12 months.
As a windows PC user I am hoping the compatibility issues wont effect me and I can enjoy the product offline.
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.)
There’s as of yet no confirmation about this. There is a lot of speculation, but there has not been official confirmation.
"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."
The article itself says at least this bit. I didn't notice anything about a "trace" thing though, but I was just skimming.
I can't read it any way other than "throw your paid-for v2, download this fremium thing, make account: to get access to image trace which is the one thing everyone has requested ever since affinity was a thing"
I could be wrong ofc, but this just looks like classic misdirection where they're pointing to the free thing but in reality it's not really free and just a distraction.
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).
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.
for the company, maybe
In a very real sense, yes.
Just like real votes, candidates will collude on issues that are bad for them, and push the discussion on trivial and/or bikesheddy issues people shouldn't really care about, keeping important arguments out of the public place.
To people who ever felt their vote were almost useless and not voting would also only make the situation worse...that's exactly how "voting with one's wallet" feel like.
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.
[1]: (FWIW, I don't know one way or the other. Apologies to any Gimp developers here.)
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.
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.
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.
Even now, over a decade after its release, FFXIV subscriptions are what’s keeping the mighty Square Enix alive.
https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/25q4slides...
I'm not sure I'm seeing the same. The gaming industry is going strong, and increasing consolidation isn't really a sign that the companies being acquired are in financial trouble, it's more about the strength and dominance of the biggest companies. And even those biggest players are continuing to release non-subscription-based titles. I'm not saying there aren't struggling gaming companies, but to me it seems that the majority are doing well for themselves, certainly there's nothing so monumental in the industry as to make me think "they're all losing money because they're not all moving to subscription services".
Square Enix also isn't really representative of the average gaming company. FFXIV seems to be their primary product in general, especially in the American and European markets. The products they cite in other sub-segments of digital entertainment are far more niche and many don't seem to be as well-received critically. They also focus a lot more on Japan than other gaming companies, for obvious reasons, which makes direct comparisons even harder. FFXIV is definitely their main cash cow due to the situation that company is in, but there's not nearly enough to map it to some sweeping industry-wide conclusion.
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.
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?
I want to own my software, not rent it.
Except for the odd fact that now you've got the software without having to pay.
Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.
As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.
Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
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.
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.
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.
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’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software, and png, jpeg and standard camera raw formats aren’t going away.
It was never updated.
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.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
I don't think I could do that with anything that was compiled for Linux or MacOS back then.
I wouldn't want to do that with anything that opens ports on my computer that was compiled back then.
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.
... 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.
In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.
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...
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
Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Windows users tend to be able to use old, even ancient versions forever with no trouble. Mac users on the other hand, often seem to be faced with having to either pay for a new software version that works with a newer version of Mac OS, or stay on an old version of the operating system - sometimes on old hardware as well.
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.
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).
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.
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.
This has a reasonable shot at eliminating reasons for designers to pass complex work back to Adobe's suite. If they disrupt Adobe's dominance at the professional end of the market, it puts Canva in a very comfortable position.
Plus it directly attacks Adobe's moat if a solid desktop app competitor is free
>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.
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.
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.
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.
It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.
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.
The original iOS version worked. Maybe don't update iOS if you want to continue using affinity's software?
Dosbox is a testament to that.
Also free is never free.
Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?
So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?
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.
I assumed the jury was still out in that one.
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.
Yes, they will. Enshittification is a constant and is driven by misaligned investment incentives to that of good products.
This never happened to me when getting something from the AppStore, or from anyone else really. And that’s the problem with cloudgarbage, you have zero control over it.
I mean, it's sort of inevitable. Eventually, Canva will find itself under pressure to grow revenue (or even just weather a downturn). The maintenance of a complex desktop application is expensive and there will be pressure to increase "conversions" by putting more and more of the useful functions behind a paywall.
That said, their immediate goal is probably to take away customers from Adobe, and right now, the product is free, has more features than the old Affinity, doesn't need to talk to activation servers on an ongoing basis, and doesn't auto-update. So we should enjoy it while it lasts.
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)
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]
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).
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.
That "nice slogan" is emphatically true.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Canva presumably see it the same way
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!
This is 100 miles away from the interoperability of Adobe's Dynamic Link whereby apps such as Premier and After Effects are 'united' in a manner that feels clunky and forced. Almost all Adobe apps were acquisitions, and most of them are now horrendously long in the tooth. Uniting them seamlessly would be impossible.
I adore Affinity photo for its top to bottom support for high dynamic range images. Editing RAW images is a buttery smooth dream, compared to Photoshop, which feels like I am banging my head against the software.
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.
I’m happy for AI subscribers to subsidise my experience ;)
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.
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.
/Applications/Affinity.app/Contents/Resources/JSLib
├── application.js
├── artboardinterface.js
├── artboardproperties.js
├── baseboxinterface.js
├── brushfillinterface.js
├── buffer.js
├── collection.js
├── colours.js
...
├── units.js
├── vectorbrush.js
└── visibilityinterface.js- 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
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.
https://penpot.app/penpothub/libraries-templates/blender-con...
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 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.
(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)
Any idea what the difference is? The cheaper one looks more capable.
Photomator = Lightroom, but without the library management
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
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.
> Generate a playful logo for product named "Serenity" using the style of Robin Hood forest and freedom themes
The result for such a simple prompt is pretty impressive: https://imgur.com/a/xLZlfQM, the produced artifact is already in vector format with tweakable curves, lines, and colors.
Well played, Canva. Maybe Affinity Studio is a smart move in the long run. I think I will be among Pro subscribers.
I for one, think this is a really nice thing, and that it gives access to really well-made and actual professional-level design tools to a huge swath of people who didn't have it before, be it for personal use or for work. No previously included feature is now part of the subscription, and they've made sure to say they'll be free forever. I see this as a huge win.
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.
And I assume this is a supplement to (and not a replacement of) the existing Affinity applications?
"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."
When this free/premium with AI thing crash and burn in a few years I can kiss that license goodbye.
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).
"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.
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.
I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it
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.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
Sure, it's free -- but it's no longer the same product with the same priorities.
Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
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.
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.
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.
Open source it, then.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
This is indeed a sad day.
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.
- "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.
I don't like the new UI. It feels dumbed down.
An UI design tab next please, some more players in that space would be nice.
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.
Remember Windows 10 was once marketed as the last Windows? I do.
The real harm here is that every time there's a rug pull, our trust evaporates just a little further while our memories get a little bit longer.
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'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.
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
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.
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)
You bought those licenses with terms that you preferred and those terms are being honored so it seems like everything worked well.
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.
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
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.
we went from v1 -> v2 -> "free" + subscription, where "free" is unsustainable in the current economic climate and they WILL have to pull shady stuff once all the AI bubble money disappears.
Give it some time and suddenly that free tier shrinks or requires a subscription to continue.
- 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.
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.
on macOS or Windows.
Why the account tie? Will it phone home to train yet another AI model on my image editing workflows? Will it work air-gapped?
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.
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.
Was the case we had 2 really good options in enterprise data destruction. EBAN with a yearly license scheme, and BLANCCO with a per hard drive wiped license scheme.
BLANCCO buys EBAN, kills the product, but permits DBAN the open source variant to be available permanently, with no modern EBAN features, and no updates.
Of course they did make one change to DBAN, it leaves a small image on wiped hard drives advertising BLANCCO.
And ofc, there was nothing really preventing Blanccos per hard drive license from increasing.
I use both Affinity V2 and Canva. I used Affinity for finicky stuff, and Canva for pointy clicky template based construction when I need something simple, fast.
I detest Canva, despite using it. Everything is advertising for the premium version. And I expect Affinity to go the same way, Canvas elements will (if not already) be integrated, and those elements will in most cases advertise themselves as being paid assets. Eventually it will go the way of DBAN and just be an advertisement for Canva.
I will ride out V2 for as long as it continues to function. Then I will find something else.
This is a tremendous loss.
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.
I don't want "Free", I want a situation where I can buy and own a perpetual license for the software.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
You’ll be the first. It’s an empty promise that can’t / won’t be fulfilled unless it’s a legally binding deal with compensation to users if the deal changes.
I bought v1 + v2 and, by most measures, settled for an inferior product to get a perpetual license. I won’t use the new one for “free” because it’s not. The cost is the very likely scenario of getting rug pulled in the future.
The day the v2 license server shuts down I’ll be asking for a refund.
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.
bro you _need_ to log off
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.
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.
It's also concerning that you have to be logged in to use a free native app
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)
I think it's super cool that you work at Canva and are taking the time to interact with your customer base.
Maybe this isn't the right venue (I didn't see an e-mail address in your profile so I'm just asking here) but can you pass along feedback to the UI team for Affinity?
I personally think most programs, especially audio / video editors are improved by:
A) Optionally having icons that have text labels in-addition to the image (i.e. the word "Cut" + scissors, "Paste" + paintbucket, etc) ; doesn't have to be full on MSFT 'Ribbon' UI either!
B) Giving users the ability to choose how big or small the icons (and associated text) are (i.e. 16-pix, 32-pix, 64-pix or small, medium, large)
For point A:
I am aware this creates a challenge when you make a release of a program for other languages, so it's a burden on the translation and software validation teams.
Use-case: I work between so many different programs when doing photo editing and learning the pictogram icons for each application is mentally burdensome that it's VERY helpful having labels as well. Otherwise I constantly find myself hovering on an icon and reading the tooltip, that text might as well be integrated into the icon!
I end up using CaptureOne for image processing, DxO for noise reduction, Affinity for pixel editing and that's just in dealing with RAW photos for one type of photography, I might use others as well depending on the subject matter.
For point B:
Our monitors now are super high DPI and squinting at tiny icons designed when we had limited real-estate is a real tax on the eyes.
Thank you again for reply on this public forum and many us who are paying customers are happier to give you guys money over companies like Adobe who now only offer subscription software.
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).
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.
... 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.
That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.
I don't know you.
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.
I don't like companies hoovering all data.
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.
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...
>Import PSDs, AIs, IDMLs, DWGs, and other file types into Affinity, with structure, layers, and creative intent preserved.
Safari is used by default, other browsers have to support this feature to use it and do not, so you just get Safari.
No, thank you.
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...
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.
If you're not the customer - you're the product.
Now I have to start over again? Ugghhh…
Just in case any Canva engineer is reading this.
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'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.
After playing with it several hours, I can say that Affinity 3 is pretty solid release. The new AI persona is surprisingly useful too.
Initially, I was reluctant to migrate from Affinity 2 but now I'm sold.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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!
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
Can you recommend any?
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.
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...
I'm so sick of sellouts.
Here's why that matters. The artboard background isn't part of a design - it’s a neutral filler color meant to visually separate artboards, much like the wall color in an art gallery. When the background is pure black, darker designs blend into it, making it almost impossible to distinguish artboard boundaries. The result? A confusing, visually fatiguing workspace.
Previous Affinity versions got this right: they used a neutral grey, a tried-and-true choice that rarely clashed with any design content.
Sadly, this feels like yet another case of form over function. I can easily imagine someone in-house thinking the black background "looked cool", but that aesthetic decision severely compromises usability - and says a lot about where priorities lie.
Canva's acquisition of Affinity gives off the same uneasy vibe as Broadcom buying VMware. Great tools, potentially questionable stewardship.
Edit: never mind, found it at Settings -> User Interface -> Artboard Background Gray Level.
(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?)
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.
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.)
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.
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)
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
Now it's "free" with an account and an optional subscription. Basically the opposite of why everyone supported them. Good luck, folks.
thank me later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-canvas-affinity-takeover...
Canva bought Affinity.
now glad people can unleash their creativity.
Into the trash it goes.
Once there was a great app, Gravit Designer. It produced the cleanest SVG markup. Too bad Corel murdered it.
- 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.
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.