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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#451

Post by shmichael »

dangus wrote: post #309
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…

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…

It's a lesson as old as history: You either exit a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#452

Post by girvo »

mung wrote: post #447

I feel like everyone is very negative about something that hasn't happened yet. This gives a desktop environment to Canva users, where the revenue actually is. It's both a trojan horse and a usable product. Will everyone's worse fears come true? Maybe, maybe not. Mean time you have an excellent app, for free, and very few software products, free, open source, closed source, perpetual, subscription.... last "forever".…

> Will everyone's worse fears come true?

Yes, they will. Enshittification is a constant and is driven by misaligned investment incentives to that of good products.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#453

Post by paulhebert »

ezfe wrote: post #404
paulhebert wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d prefer to have them release a new version every X years and let me buy that for a fixed cost. (This is how Adobe used to work)

You can't have your cake (one time payments) and eat it too (software gets perpetual updates). Perpetual licenses with 1 year of updates is a good middle ground, but they have said that the v2 suite will get maintenance updates for some period of time so even that type of license would not have changed this conversation.

Sure. I get that. My ideal scenario is that existing versions get security patches and critical bug fixes but you have to upgrade for new features.

But I realize that’s less lucrative and not how modern software tends to work

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#454

Post by unreal37 »

Razengan wrote: post #444
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…

Man. This is another case in favor of open source. OSS may take years to get there but it doesn't go poof in one sudden day either.

Open Source absolutely stops being maintained. And worse.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#455

Post by InsideOutSanta »

mung wrote: post #447

I feel like everyone is very negative about something that hasn't happened yet. This gives a desktop environment to Canva users, where the revenue actually is. It's both a trojan horse and a usable product. Will everyone's worse fears come true? Maybe, maybe not. Mean time you have an excellent app, for free, and very few software products, free, open source, closed source, perpetual, subscription.... last "forever".…

The new version is a nice update over v2, with some great new features.

The downside is that some useful features like background removal will never come to the non-subscription version. OTOH, the subscription is cheap if you think of it as license cost for an Adobe alternative.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#456

Post by Gigachad »

microtonal wrote: post #316
nirava wrote: post #238

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…

I'm sad (buyer of both v1 and v2). Being a paid app as opposed to require a subscription was the main selling over the Adobe Suite. A lot of users migrated to Affinity for that reason. As the free version will get more and more crippled as they move to pushing subscriptions, why not switch back to Adobe? I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.

I’m kinda keen on this. A few months ago I was looking at making a one time magazine print, but I discovered there were essentially no affordable options. The affinity option was the cheapest one, but still unaffordable for a one time project.

I don’t even mind paying a subscription but the adobe option requires you to get a minimum of 12 months.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#457

Post by aleph_minus_one »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #318
carlosjobim wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.

Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely. Of course, t…

Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.

This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#458

Post by donmcronald »

ezfe wrote: post #350
nirava wrote: post #238

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…

Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates. Everyone wanted a one time license, you aren't allowed to complain when that one-time licensed product stops getting updates. Note: I own a license to V2 of the Serif suite.

> That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.

You also lose the ability to access your data in a lot of cases. That's the problem. I also own a v1 and v2 license for the Affinity stuff. I've used it to design myself exactly one logo, so I would have been way better off subscribing to Adobe's stuff for a month, right?

Wrong, at least in my opinion. The problem with subscriptions is that you lose control over future access to your data. For my logo, I'm fine with Affinity Designer v2 never getting updated as long as I can load the software and use it as-is.

I recently loaded up an abandoned Java project that I haven't looked at in a dozen years. I use IntelliJ IDEA and it wouldn't load in the most recent version of IDEA because the Gradle version used in the project was too old. I fired up my self-hosted server that I used at the time, installed IDEA v8, added a hostname for the Sonatype Nexus server to my DNS, and loaded my old project to look around.

You can barely do that anymore because you don't own or control anything. Everything is subscription based, pay forever, with deep links to infrastructure you don't control either. I can mostly do it because I refuse to get on the subscription "never control anything" bandwagon, but I'll still probably get burned by online activation at some point.

Just wait until everyone has 2 decades of AI context locked away behind paywalls controlled by a handful of companies. Everything in existence will be vendor locked and those companies will usurp every novel idea anyone is naive enough to feed in as context.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#460

Post by donmcronald »

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.

> I mean 20+ years ago we called this shareware.

It's not even close. This is more akin to shareware where Bill Gates shows up at your house to collect a payment every month and formats your hard drive if you don't cough up the money.

Shareware gave you a perpetual license and control that couldn't be taken away, especially before the internet.

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