Earlier quoted context omitted.
For personal use, piracy is always an option.
How does that work with SaaS?
timeon_affinity_001@gmail.com
Affinity Studio now free
301–310 of 825 posts
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#302Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.
I'm so sick of sellouts.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#303The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!). I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
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Re: Affinity Studio now free
#304Thoughts on opensource alternatives? - Inkscape is an obvious one --- there's also https://cenon.info/ , perhaps Gravit Designer? Any word on Graphite.rs 's stand-alone desktop version? - GIMP, Paint.net, Darktable and Krita - Scribus or LaTeX or Typst
And Blender.
Yeah I know it sounds like a joke, but all Blender's icons are made in Blender, so it's officially an 2D vector graphics app too.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#305This 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…
That sucks for that usecase, agreed.
On the plus side, there is finally a free modern piece of software that matches 80s MacDraw and MacPaint on the Mac. (Keynote isn’t it.)
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#306Re: Affinity Studio now free
#307I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here: Serif is the company that originally built this software. -------- 2014–2024 Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model: - Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent) - Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent) - Affinity Pub…
It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too).
Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#308It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license). But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model. I think their bet i…
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…
> free is unsustainable
Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.
They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.
So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#309I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here: Serif is the company that originally built this software. -------- 2014–2024 Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model: - Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent) - Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent) - Affinity Pub…
I realize that money rules everything but I find it so confusing that so many companies will spend a decade building a great product and then just exit with full knowledge that it will be the inevitable end of the relevance of their work.
You might think that some founders somewhere out there would be motivated by some level of ego to say “no, I won’t sell out, I built this amazing thing and the highest bidder owner will milk it dry.”
But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.
Re: Affinity Studio now free
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 softwar…
not just identical, the new "free" thing will have more. popular requests like image trace and vector blend go to the "free" but not v2 (which, on its own is understandable tbh, no one expects a one time purchase of v2 to improve for eternity)
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.