Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Affinity Studio now free

affinity.studio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 825 posts

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#661

Post by trinix912 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #416
alt227 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why has Canva been giving massive amounts of their quality development away for free for over 10 years?

It's never been free, they've always been developing stuff to push you to Canva Pro.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#663

Post by smokel »

bovermyer wrote: post #327
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…

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.

It doesn't come close to InDesign, but for some purposes Scribus [1] might be a viable alternative. I use it (in combination with a lot of Python scripting) to produce a printed diary every year.

[1] https://www.scribus.net/

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#664

Post by sakjur »

simondotau wrote: post #566
groby_b wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. It was a great app. Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)

To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.

That’s a good way of putting it. Previously Serif’s goals were aligned with my wishes. They’d release a new version of the software ever so often and I’d pay to upgrade. Fair.

Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#665

Post by CodeShmode »

trinix912 wrote: post #661
blackqueeriroh wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why has Canva been giving massive amounts of their quality development away for free for over 10 years?

It's never been free, they've always been developing stuff to push you to Canva Pro.

The issue being they don’t give everything away for free?

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#666

Post by CodeShmode »

okanat wrote: post #252
codeptualize wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a premium plan for the AI features, so that's the strategy, which does make some sense, I bet a lot of people will want to have those features.

Good software is never freemium. It is either paid upfront or it is a timebomb. I am okay with keeping things proprietary and asking for a fair price. Once free-to-play is introduced, the software is gone for good. I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it

Canva proper is freemium, yet they continuously add more free features

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#667

Post by SulphurCrested »

microtonal wrote: post #322
miladyincontrol wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw formats arent going away but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles. Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.

I haven't checked, do they use Apple's RAW library on macOS? If so, at least support might evolve with macOS updates for the time being.

The Photo (v2) app gives you a choice of using Apple’s converters or “Serif” converters. But, when last I looked, lens corrections were not available with the Apple converters.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#668

Post by mns »

simondotau wrote: post #566
groby_b wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. It was a great app. Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)

To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.

Once they manage to get enough Adobe customers on there and get some good market share, the investors will want their money multiplied (and you can't realistically do that just with AI features), so they will use the same playbook like any other business out there that used VC money to take over a market, and make you pay, probably first for proper support, and then more and more updates will come only to the + subscriptions.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#669

Post by spiffx »

bovermyer wrote: post #327
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…

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.

After using InDesign CS6 for many years, (small-scale print/publishing), and trying Affinity Publisher for a time, I stumbled across VivaDesigner a while ago: https://viva.systems/designer/

I don't know how it compares to QuarkXpress, but it's a pretty good commercial replacement for InDesign / Publisher in my personal opinion: it has decent typography, styles, and good options for PDF/X-4 export (with FOGRA39 as a destination etc). I've also successfully imported .idml

They have various perpetual / subscription options (I'm on a commercial perpetual licence), a decent trial version, and they even do a Linux version, which works great for me on Mageia9.

I've contacted their support a few times, and they've been very responsive, professional and helpful, which was a pleasant surprise.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#670

Post by ctippett »

I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but the application bundle on macOS hints at a pretty robust scripting API using Javascript. The functionality doesn't seem to be exposed from what I can see in the app.

  /Applications/Affinity.app/Contents/Resources/JSLib
  ├── application.js
  ├── artboardinterface.js
  ├── artboardproperties.js
  ├── baseboxinterface.js
  ├── brushfillinterface.js
  ├── buffer.js
  ├── collection.js
  ├── colours.js
  ...
  ├── units.js
  ├── vectorbrush.js
  └── visibilityinterface.js
Post reply on HN