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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#211

Post by fumeux_fume »

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…

I feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#214

Post by rcarmo »

viraptor wrote: post #194
scblock wrote: post #131

I'm done with this. Open source only from here on out. You can't trust anyone in this day and age to turn not their products into AI pushing garbage.

Unfortunately there is no realistic vector drawing open source app for MacOS. Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag. LibreDraw is ok for very basic things. But that's about it.

Well, if Apple did something about it... We would at least have some half-assed thing that would look good in commercials.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#215

Post by viraptor »

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…

> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.

... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#216

Post by underlipton »

pavlov wrote: post #25
nocoiner wrote: post #2

This seems … way better than what I expected following the acquisition? What am I missing? And I assume this is a supplement to (and not a replacement of) the existing Affinity applications?

It is a replacement, the old Affinity apps are discontinued: "Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates. "For the best experience, we recommend using the new Affinity by Canva app."

New corollary to the maxim, "If it's free, you're the product":

"If the paid version can no longer be purchased, the 'free' version WILL be neutered."

They have to remove the option to compare the free, paid, and subscription versions.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#217

Post by rcarmo »

jama211 wrote: post #207
rcarmo wrote: post #202

Well, I downloaded the Mac app, and here's what I don't like: - Goodness gracious, that icon. And 3.5GB????? - Requires a login (so I suppose no disconnected operation) - Seems to jumble together the vector, bitmap and publishing apps (which I very much prefer to have as separate things) Mostly everything I've been able to try in 30 minutes seems to work, but a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times. Will most likely k…

It’s because it’s four apps in one, they merged the affinity suite apps then added their own ai app too

Fine, but the Mac mini I downloaded this in has very little internal storage, so I am not using this and will only keep the old designer and publisher apps around (Pixelmator is better for my use case)

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#218

Post by bigbuppo »

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…

Yep, this is the first step of enshittification. It's all downhill from here. It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#219

Post by ryandrake »

matwood wrote: post #148
Freedom2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?

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

This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
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