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

691–700 of 825 posts

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#691

Post by sethaurus »

mns wrote: post #668
simondotau wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 + subsc…

The alternative is that they monetize it the same way Canva monetizes its other products: most features free, "pro" subscription for online collaboration/server-driven stuff and a library of stock content. Plus an enterprise tier.

All of that could get added to affinity without changing its core offering, which would be consistent with both their past strategy and their current messaging.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#692

Post by isodev »

derefr wrote: post #518
isodev wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I didn't make any assertion about AI, only about "AI" (note the quotes in my GP comment) — i.e. the same old machine-learning-based features like super-resolution upscaling, patch-match, etc, that people have been adding to image-editing software for more than a decade now, but which now get branded as "AI" because people recognize them by this highly-saturated marketing term. Few artists want generative-AI diffusion…

Next time, tell it to make you a comment in 150 characters. Nobody has time to read AI slop

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#693

Post by whywhywhywhy »

rcarmo wrote: post #217
jama211 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because it’s four apps in one, they merged the affinity suite apps then added their own ai app too

Fine, but the Mac mini I downloaded this in has very little internal storage, so I am not using this and will only keep the old designer and publisher apps around (Pixelmator is better for my use case)

Well the same Adobe apps would be around 10GB so it's a bit pointless to complain about it.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#694

Post by 9rx »

tracker1 wrote: post #555
dangus wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have controlling stake in a company without working there day to day. Apple literally destroyed those companies. After Apple acquired NeXT there was one less operating system on the market. PA Semi now doesn’t have a product that is sold to the open market.

What do you think MacOS since v10 is?

MacOS v10+ accounts for NeXTSTEP, but what do you consider to be the current MacOS (classic) to satisfy the not having one less operating system condition?

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#695

Post by anentropic »

gotrythis wrote: post #449
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 am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version. This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades. I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.

Right at this moment the situation is great (basically the same thing but for free!), but this does look like the beginning of a spiral of enshittification.

I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#696

Post by apfsx »

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…

But is the new Affinity app quite literally feature equivalent? Is there anything the latest version of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo Desktop edition can do that the new combined Affinity app cannot do? That's my only concern.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#697

Post by WillAdams »

indrora wrote: post #429
WillAdams wrote: post #287

Thoughts 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

Gravit Designer was sunset 9/1 of this year after the acquisition by Corel.

Darn, that's sad to hear.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#698

Post by WillAdams »

sedatk wrote: post #535
WillAdams wrote: post #287

Thoughts 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

Paint.NET isn't open source, is it?

Good point, free as in beer, right?

https://github.com/orgs/paintdotnet/repositories

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#699

Post by comradesmith »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #572
mythz wrote: post #33

Awesome, expected Canva were going to jack up the prices or turn it into a subscription after acquisition. A freemium version is very welcome for the rare times I need to use it. No plans to ever be a paying customer myself (sorry Canva), but nice to know it's still being actively developed. Just noticed the AI feature integrations are locked behind a premium sub, makes sense to go for a wide funnel with a premium fr…

I doubt this is good, I'd expect minimal investment in the free version and ever increasing subscriptions. I WANT to pay for my software.

The better they support the free side, the better the conversion rates will be. So I think the incentives align with both free and paying customers

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#700

Post by emsign »

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…

Oh, so it's disguised as being free but in reality it's one major step towards becoming a subscription model. Got it.
Post reply on HN