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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#431

Post by tavavex »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #407
Sharlin wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but shareware was pay-once, which many people find preferable to a subscription-chained model.

You don’t have to keep paying for a subscription. You can stop at any time and still have access to all the non-AI features.

Yes, that's the situation at launch. The fear that's expressed above is that the subscription model incentivizes pushing people towards it as hard as possible. It's the exact opposite of Serif's straightforward model from before. Get ready for most new features (including ones that are unrelated to AI) to become locked to the subscription model. When they think they're not getting enough out of Affinity, they may also start cutting core functionality to force people to subscribe. Maybe, a limit on how many documents you can edit at once, or a layer limit (for the photo part), or an object limit (for the vector/"designer" part). This is how all of these subscriptions go nowadays.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#432

Post by aleph_minus_one »

bigyabai wrote: post #392
pmkary wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model. In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Ma…

> In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting.

I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#433

Post by secabeen »

derefr wrote: post #342
derefr wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.” Keeping in mind that: 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy) 2. Large ML models require a lot of reso…

That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app. The fact that the apps are now free , suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth. --- Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one r…

Pricing in most businesses has little relation to the cost of developing and making the product. Most businesses price relative to the value that their product delivers to the customer. If there is robust competition, then the price is often driven down towards the cost, but it's not driven by the cost. In Adobe's case, they see that there is an entire industry of creative people using their products as their primary tool(s). Those employees are often paid well, with salaries from 50k-100k per year as common. Is it not reasonable (from Adobe's perspective) that employers pay 1/50th of the employee's salary for their primary and most useful tool? No one complains when the plumber requires a work truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#435

Post by bovermyer »

smrtinsert wrote: post #379
bovermyer wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe. I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.

How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?

I haven't used it for that purpose much, but it seems to lag pretty far behind Photoshop/Affinity Photo.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#436

Post by kilpikaarna »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #359
t-writescode wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nondestructive changes, in Affinity, Photoshop and Substance Painter are all amazing, yeah. They also exist on all 3 of those software :) In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.

Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)

Smart objects and smart filters were present in early CS versions I think. CS5/CS6 had them for sure, though I don't doubt that new filters and features have been added in CC.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#437

Post by tavavex »

bigyabai wrote: post #392
pmkary wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model. In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Ma…

> indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model

The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.

No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#438

Post by isodev »

derefr wrote: post #314
alt227 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.” Keeping in mind that: 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy) 2. Large ML models require a lot of reso…

> 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand

No, there’re not. People with influence or who have invested in the space say that these features are in demand/the next big thing. In reality, I haven’t seen a single user interview where the person actively wanted or was even excited about AI.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#439

Post by mjmas »

Won't this end up how Draftsight did? (Free for years but required user details, and then Dassault decided to disable each and every free installation and require a subscription)

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#440

Post by vednig »

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…

They're doing an Adobe Creative Cloud with Canva now, Great !
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