Affinity Studio now free • Hacker News Board

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#171

Post by BrouteMinou » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #149

mns wrote: post #137

Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing. There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can s…

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The FOMO created by online games. You need the latest DLC to get the latest armour you know...

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#172

Post by slig » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

Balvarez wrote: post #162

Let's aquire software that people love using... and then kill what they love about it!!

We have to understand that we're a minority and they're after another market. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#173

Post by mwkaufma » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

exasperaited wrote: post #145

mwkaufma wrote: post #117

Many comments here that this "makes sense." Free does not make sense! If I'm not paying for it I'm not the customer anymore.

That depends on whether they have anything to sell you. Like Da Vinci Resolve's free version, for example; they have something pro to sell you (and hardware). Canva presumably see it the same way

"presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#174

Post by poisonborz » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #89

glimshe wrote: post #54

Nooooooo! I'm a loyal Serif customer and paid for their software. I LOVE Affinity. And I HATE "free" commercial products because they need to extract revenue from subscription services, ads, data selling etc. This is the first step toward making Affinity become another rental application like Photoshop. Escaping Adobe's predatory business model is exactly why I became a Serif customer in the first place.

I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva. This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan. We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever. AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription. I understand why you feel that way. Having being…

Why is an account necessary then? Stop saying it's free when it's not.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#175

Post by Maxious » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

Flux159 wrote: post #164

Is this built with JS / something like Fabric JS? There are some things that feel very similar to a web app that I worked on before. Wondering if there's plans to have a plugin API at some point if it is.

There is support for photoshop plugins https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pag...

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#176

Post by Zealotux » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

I was just looking yesterday for a simple vector editor, will give it a try. Sorry, Inkscape is a total mess to use.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#177

Post by latexr » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #149

mns wrote: post #137

Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing. There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can s…

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> It’ll keep working for decades to come

“Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#178

Post by internetter » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

You can link your V2 store purchases by signing into the app, clicking the dropdown with your name in the top left of the popup window, and clicking on the "Advanced" dropdown

I don't like the new UI. It feels dumbed down.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#179

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

Freedom2 wrote: post #151

matwood wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you freeze your machine in its current state, software that isn't maintained will eventually stop working.

That doesn't mean it disappears though - it still exists, just in a non-working state.

[deleted]

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#180

Post by freeAgent » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 5:37 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #139

microflash wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Affinity v1 suite's offline activation model. Sadly that changed in v2 and the same thing is happening now. Is there any hope to enable activating v2 offline? That way I can still install and use it when you eventually shutdown the activation server.

I understand why this is important. I’ll try my best to see what we can do :) Thank you for the great feedback.

It would be great to patch the v2 apps into an "offline mode." Then you don't have to worry about maintaining the license servers.