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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#331

Post by [deleted] »

dannyw wrote: post #62
odie5533 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.

Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here. That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it. I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.

[deleted]

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#332

Post by renewiltord »

pmkary wrote: post #239
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…

I mean, what’s the problem? You wanted a pay once use forever and you got that with v2. So keep using v2. No one is going to charge your credit card.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#333

Post by jazzyjackson »

alt227 wrote: post #253
pentagrama wrote: post #143

I 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…

This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif. Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone…

I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize

Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#334

Post by pier25 »

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…

Maybe today but what about 12-24 months from now?

You will need to build a lot of trust in the next couple of years.

Personally I lost faith in Affinity after waiting for a decade for a feature requested dozena of times in the forum (group isolation in Designer).

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#335

Post by WorldMaker »

ndiddy wrote: post #296
WorldMaker wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.

Today's Corel seems very much a "use at your own security/bug risk" license-selling factory. They still sell support contracts (because those are lucrative) and sometimes patch the software for big security issues, but they seem to do that on a staff that is far more salespeople and lawyers (to wrangle ancient B2B legal contracts and new "minimal effort" security support contracts) than software developers. Their business model doesn't seem to be as much "selling desktop software" as it seems to be "fulfilling old support contracts for the zombies of classic desktop software".

That said, yes, maybe PSP and CorelDraw will solve some uses of parts of Affinity's stack for people looking for an alternative and don't mind paying close to full price for code that is mostly frozen in time from the late 90s and early 00s.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#336

Post by [deleted] »

netghost wrote: post #320
damnesian wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 There's a plague of this on the entire industry now. Free apps abound, none of them will do exactly what you need, all of them will point you to the shiny unfree thing that will.

I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware. If you get value out of the free part of a tool, great! If not, then you get to choose to pay for the rest or not. Personally I'm happy that it tends to be the feature set I can live without that costs money. Not always, but often enough.

[deleted]

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#337

Post by starkparker »

dannyw wrote: post #104
MerrimanInd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this . This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.…

I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term. On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.

> a macro and game-theory perspective

bro you _need_ to log off

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#338

Post by hmstx »

greggh wrote: post #235

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…

Seems like it's,

- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?

- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)

- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)

For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.

I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#340

Post by LeoPanthera »

reaperducer wrote: post #317
spiderice wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.

I see that there is Pixelmator ($50) and Photomator ($120), both from Apple. Any idea what the difference is? The cheaper one looks more capable.

Pixelmator = Photoshop

Photomator = Lightroom, but without the library management

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