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Affinity Studio now free

affinity.studio

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#231

Post by ryandrake »

freeAgent wrote: post #180
dannyw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#232

Post by latexr »

slig wrote: post #188
meindnoch wrote: post #74

>Sign up to download Into the trash it goes.

You really like to say that, don't you? https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45707186

Doesn’t even make sense. If you need an account to download, then before you make the account there is nothing to trash.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#233

Post by bigbuppo »

WorldMaker wrote: post #205
sbarre wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free is unsustainable This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel. Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products. Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (…

I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was . Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remai…

On the plus side, when they layoff every single person that worked on Affinity in order to better align with something something market strategy, those people will be able to get together and start a new non-subscription desktop design applications company... with blackjack... and hookers.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#234

Post by Kye »

latexr wrote: post #204
gspencley wrote: post #134

I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva. This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :( The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affin…

> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model They explicitly promised they wouldn’t switch to a subscription model, during the acquisition. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/ Whether that is true is another thing altogether.

Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#235

Post by greggh »

I don't understand this thread at all. I think this is the first time I have seen a thread that talks about something requiring a new account be created at some company, and a nonsensical major change to a product (merging the products into one, optional subscriptions) where the majority of people seem to be saying "thats ok and good luck" to the company. Worse, people who are upset this has happened to software they liked are getting downvoted. These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.

It feels like the thread is being astroturfed.

They removed our software that we paid for from the Mac Store, and everyone is just like "thats fine, good move canva". Serif did a great job of keeping their software working through macOS major version updates. It's another reason many of us paid for their software. That's gone, and people are just cheering them on. It's very confusing.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#236

Post by sarreph »

stavros wrote: post #128
sarreph wrote: post #47

After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer. C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)... Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for…

What was the difference between v1 and v2?

V1 felt polished to a degree that implied the developers had thought a lot about how their product should provide a compelling user experience. It was also very performant and rarely crashed.

V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#237

Post by spiderice »

bigbuppo wrote: post #218
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.

> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year

It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.

I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#238

Post by nirava »

This is a deletion.

- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.

- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years

In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#239

Post by pmkary »

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 was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
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