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Affinity Studio now free

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Re: Affinity Studio now free

#731

Post by maccard »

carlosjobim wrote: post #725
maccard wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone wanted a one time license, you aren't allowed to complain when that one-time licensed product stops getting updates. A one time license is sold on the promise of future updates perpetually to this version. If serif said “we’re not adding AI tools to v2, we’re going to go to v3 instead” I’d be fine with it. But instead they’re taking the updates they were providing to us anyway and packaging them up under a…

> A one time license is sold on the promise of future updates perpetually to this version. No it is not and has never been. Of course not, and you must understand that.

That’s exactly what is.

Of course legally they’re entitled to not do that, but google are also legally entitled to close your account for any reason they see fit. If they mass deactivated accounts on one of those clauses they’d likely legally be right but they’d be pulling a real asshole move, which is what affinity/canva have done here.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#732

Post by ch_fr »

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…

If you are allowed to speak on this, I'd like to know, are the reasons Canva is so adamantly refusing to consider a Linux build purely technical (like, a "we have to rebuilt its entire foundations"-kind of refactor)?

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#733

Post by pqb »

samuell wrote: post #676
monkeywork wrote: post #648

Wish they would properly support linux - the Affinity products are PAINFUL if not near impossible to get working in wine.

I was going to ask about wine support. Anyone tried in Bottles (wine distribution)? I've had better luck with Bottles than plain Wine with other software. Hoping to try soon.

In the article [0] (also posted on HackerNews [1]) they share a link to page, which is a guide how to run new Affinity (v3) using Wine/Bottles combo [2].

[0]: https://tedium.co/2025/10/30/canva-affinity-free-loss-leader...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771211

[2]: https://affinity.liz.pet/

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#734

Post by [deleted] »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #720
radiKal07 wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kdenlive is free and open-source and is so great, such a slept on app

I've been trying to use Kdenlive for years now, and everyone raves about how great it is. I don't know what they're doing with it, because it seems to lack even the most basic editing functionality.

[deleted]

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#736

Post by qustrolabe »

This thread is pure doomerism. Program became free and people made up tens of scenarios why this is bad, awful and literally the end. I mean I understand it's "too good to be true" and some "rug pull" is coming, but people acting like it's "over over".

So far what I've got is a new amazing photo editor that's unlike GIMP has "Inpaint brush" and "Patch tool" and even has free built-in image segmentation model and tons of other good features and even, seems, should support Photoshop plugins. Even if every single new feature going from now on will be gated behind some absurdly priced subscription I'm still totally fine with what i've been given already.

No way they bet entirely on AI thing popping off, unless they'll come up with their own "Nano Banana" idk who really needs simple "text to image" model, and even if they do it's still not that good to be worthy of subscription. On another note subscription right now also gives access to three local running models: upscale, depth map generation and colorizer, pretty cool small models in addition to segmentation that's given for free, I guess they might end up adding additional later there. Another thing I see is that several third party services baked in, for example Dropbox in linked services and two stock image providers Pexels and Pixabay, maybe that covers some cost for them. On mysterious ploy to gather all users data for Big AI I see one concerning thing: Right away program asked whether I want to share data and I selected option "no" but then in settings suspicious "Send usage and performance data to Affinity" was enabled, either I forgot that I pressed yes or it's a bug or something intentional.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#737

Post by saurik »

ezfe wrote: post #577
roywiggins wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of my photos are stored in a big Lightroom database. If I wasn't using an old camera supported by Lightroom 5 (that I bought outright in 2011), and was using modern Lightroom instead, I would have to pay an ongoing cost just to maintain access to my photo database, in perpetuity . This sucks no matter how much the subscription actually is right now. Losing access to all your old work in its original format if you…

I understand what you're saying, and yeah, that does suck. > Losing access to all your old work in its original format Most photo editing apps retain your originals, even when they're in a database. For example, Apple Photos has a folder full of originals with no modifications. Does Lightroom not have this? I understand that there is a lot of metadata that you also want, I'm just curious about this detail?

I think the modifications here are the "original work" in question. Like, I would be wanting to save the thing I spent a lot of time myself working on -- the edits to the photos -- in their "original format": the way Lightroom is dealing with it as modifications on top of raw photos.

Re: Affinity Studio now free

#740

Post by 47282847 »

immibis wrote: post #672
Gabrys1 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pCloud also has lifetime payment for a storage service. This must be some kind of Ponzi scheme, I guess they must count on 1. storage getting cheaper 2. traffic getting cheaper 3. that people will need more and more storage with time

Lifetime means until the company is bankrupt or gets acquired. It doesn't mean your lifetime.

I’ve had multiple “lifetime“ accounts cancelled on me without bankruptcy, just changes in their product line. It doesn’t seem to mean anything.
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