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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#271

Post by reaperducer »

seemaze wrote: post #140
tensor wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal y…

It looks like it is an offline application (after license verification) in he FAQ >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.

>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.

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.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#272

Post by crowcroft »

Kye wrote: post #187
crowcroft wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> "What exactly do you expect from them?" Nothing. No one asked for Canva. The acquisition is an imposition by a company that has not earned the trust we had in Serif.

You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#274

Post by user_7832 »

nirava wrote: post #249
user_7832 wrote: post #130

Side/relevant (?) note, earlier this month, serif had made affinity free (at least for iPad if not for others as well). Many had speculated a v3 or something coming up… but I suppose “everything is free” is pretty nice too? (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?)

disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software. 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 "th…

> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.

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.)

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#275

Post by indiantinker »

alt227 wrote: post #258
indiantinker wrote: post #76

So did they buy Affinity and all their tools and gave it for free? https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/

Yep, but dont expect the level of quality development that was there before. These'free' tools are to attract you to buy ai. They are now only selling tools. Serif were pushing to beat Adobe at their own game and make the best designer tools available. Canva are just trying to sell you ai.

Interesting. Yes, the pro features seem to be just about ai these days. I used affinity’s indesign equivalent while at work and it was quite good. I wonder what the business model is? Same as figma a while back?

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#276

Post by qingcharles »

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…

[flagged]

You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#277

Post by qingcharles »

johnhamlin wrote: post #101

Love to see this the day Adobe emailed to say it’s hiking my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription by 50% ($10/mo -> $15/mo)

I get this every single year. Just go on to their web site, call up a human agent on their chat and tell them it's too expensive. They have a ton of offers to get it back down to what you were paying before.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#279

Post by turnsout »

thewebguyd wrote: post #120
turnsout wrote: post #20

As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example. 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 legitim…

I was skeptical about the all-in-one but it's executed really well, to the point that now I really want Adobe to do the same thing for Lightroom (Classic) and Photoshop. 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.

I 100% agree. It feels so clunky to do the LR -> PS -> LR roundtrip!

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#280

Post by stavros »

sarreph wrote: post #236
stavros wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ah, that's too bad. Thanks for the background!
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