Love to see this the day Adobe emailed to say it’s hiking my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription by 50% ($10/mo -> $15/mo)
Affinity Studio now free
101–110 of 825 posts
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#102The 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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
> 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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#106Nooooooo! 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…
> 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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#107So did they buy Affinity and all their tools and gave it for free? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/
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Re: Affinity Studio now free
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#109Nooooooo! 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…
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.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.