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I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here: Serif is the company that originally built this software. -------- 2014–2024 Serif develo

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 Publisher: print and layout design (Adobe InDesign equivalent) They were solid, professional tools without subscriptions like Adobe, a big reason why many designers loved them. ------- 2024 Canva acquired Serif. ------- 2025 (today) The product has been relaunched. The three apps are now merged into a single app, simply called Affinity, and it follows a freemium model. From what I’ve tested, you need a Canva account to download and open the app (you can opt out of some telemetry during setup). The new app has four tabs: - Vector: formerly Affinity Designer - Pixel: formerly Affinity Photo - Layout: formerly Affinity Publisher - Canva AI: a new, paid AI-powered section Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/h1S6fcK https://imgur.com/a/h1S6fcK Hope can help!

davedx 11mo ago
I worked at Serif during the early years of their pivot from boxed desktop software in C++ for Windows to an internet company making modern design software. It was a nice place to work, had some good friends there. Been interesting watching their journey.
- junon 11mo ago
  I got the impression there was a disconnect between product and eng teams based on quite a few spicy responses from Serif on the forums. Was that the case?
- Telemakhos 11mo ago
  I just want to say "thank you." I use Affinity Publisher 2 (and used the first version) on a daily basis, and it's been amazing. I think I heard once that Affinity started because the founders wanted to publish a newsletter, and they developed image editing and vector editing software en route to making the page layout software they wanted. If that's true, it's an awesome route to take in life; if not, they (and you) still did an awesome job making software that understands user workflows and accomplishes wonderful things. You've made my life easier for years.
alt227 11mo ago
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 else.
- derefr 11mo ago
  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 resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!) 3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.) Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster. Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster. Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable. You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.) Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.
bambax 11mo ago
I still use the Affinity desktop apps (before the move to the store) and they're fine.
raincole 11mo ago
Is "Affinity Studio" the version that is online-only and was down with AWS a week ago? Or that's a different thing? (I don't know much about Affinity suite)
- InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
  No. It didn't exist a week ago and doesn't require Internet, apart from an initial login.
  - stackedinserter 11mo ago
    Why do you need to login into something that doesn't require Internet?
    - booi 11mo ago
      you know why...
    - simondotau 11mo ago
      It's functionally identical to the software registration requirement of previous Affinity software releases, except that instead of verifying a registration number, it's now verifying a (currently) free Canva account credential.
    - jwitthuhn 11mo ago
      So you can only use it if Canva has your email and they can send you exciting new offers.
fidotron 11mo ago
It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too). Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
- blackqueeriroh 11mo ago
  A sad end because of why? What has happened to make it a sad end?
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  > Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire. It’s interesting that none of the independent tools survive for long. I wonder if Adobe Illustrator is so dominant that there is little room left for the competitors.
  - timc3 11mo ago
    I believe there is room left, particularly as some users would still be preferring to use Freehand after all this time, but Figma is strong in this space now.
dangus 11mo ago
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 will milk it dry.” But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.
- truncate 11mo ago
  >> technology the cult of the exit rules all Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).
  - dangus 11mo ago
    You can have controlling ownership in a company that you don’t manage on a day-to-day basis.
    - truncate 11mo ago
      It may or may not work out. Once you are not actively involved, its not per your vision anymore anyway. And at the end of the day, if you don't think e.g. in this case its very hard compete with Adobe and I really don't want to risk my payday, you'll sell it and move on to do whatever next you want to do. If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
- wat10000 11mo ago
  How much of this is just getting a skewed view because you don't typically hear about the acquisitions that don't happen? Beyond that, overcoming bias is really hard. An acquirer is probably going to talk a good game about how the acquisition is going to benefit the product and the customers from more resources, better integration, etc. Hearing that, we know it's probably BS, or sincere but incorrect. But when an eight or nine figure pile of money is on the line, you have a very strong subconscious motivation to believe it.
bovermyer 11mo ago
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.
- smrtinsert 11mo ago
  How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?
  - bovermyer 11mo ago
    I haven't used it for that purpose much, but it seems to lag pretty far behind Photoshop/Affinity Photo.
  - pwatsonwailes 11mo ago
    Nowhere even close
  - mamonoleechi 11mo ago
    Color correction has been there for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbU8FqTI-A4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbU8FqTI-A4 but it was destructive (on the video it is gimp 2.10, but it was there before) They added non-destructive adjustment layers in gimp version 3.0 that can do the same
- insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  > don't have a good alternative for InDesign There really is none, at least not that is comparable. InDesign is perhaps the one product where Adobe really shines. Aldus PageMaker and Quark XPress were worthy predecessors; I used both back in the day, but Adobe bought PageMaker and discontinued it. As for Quark, not sure what happened to them but they're not around anymore.
iamphilrae 11mo ago
And so the enshittification begins. Such a shame to lose another set of solid, non-subscription-based desktop apps.
- gazook89 11mo ago
  Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license. In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it. Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.
  - sngz 11mo ago
    > Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free. they always do
  - girvo 11mo ago
    > Perhaps it gets worse over time. It quite literally always always does.
    - reddalo 11mo ago
      Yeah, 100% sure it will get worse, especially after the AI bubble pops.
      - bdangubic 11mo ago
        the ai bubble has already popped!!! the biggest tech companies on the planet who are spending insane amounts of capex on “ai” keep reporting insane earnings reports one after another, things are popping left & right
        11mo ago
vednig 11mo ago
They're doing an Adobe Creative Cloud with Canva now, Great !
- nashashmi 11mo ago
  Without charging for the desktop software.
gotrythis 11mo ago
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.
- tecleandor 11mo ago
  Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing: Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans: Are AI features available? Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity. Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan? No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts. Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.
  - elAhmo 11mo ago
    So, unless you want to use AI, which wasn't available in the previous products, you are not missing out on anything?
    - nashashmi 11mo ago
      This is what I don’t understand. Why complain about it if the model gives you everything except the cloud service?
  - input_sh 11mo ago
    Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top. If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
    - 11mo ago
groby_b 11mo ago
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)
- simondotau 11mo ago
  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.
  - sakjur 11mo ago
    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.
  - mns 11mo ago
    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.
    - sethaurus 11mo ago
      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.
eboynyc32 11mo ago
Nothing beats Adobe. IMHO.
nguyenkien 11mo ago
You need account to use, but can download without account. https://www.affinity.studio/download https://www.affinity.studio/download
yard2010 11mo ago
Flames to dust / Lovers to friends Why do all good things come to an end?
apfsx 11mo ago
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.
emsign 11mo ago
Oh, so it's disguised as being free but in reality it's one major step towards becoming a subscription model. Got it.
- lr0 11mo ago
  I don't get what makes you say so?

davedx 11mo ago

I worked at Serif during the early years of their pivot from boxed desktop software in C++ for Windows to an internet company making modern design software. It was a nice place to work, had some good friends there. Been interesting watching their journey.

junon 11mo ago
I got the impression there was a disconnect between product and eng teams based on quite a few spicy responses from Serif on the forums. Was that the case?
Telemakhos 11mo ago
I just want to say "thank you." I use Affinity Publisher 2 (and used the first version) on a daily basis, and it's been amazing. I think I heard once that Affinity started because the founders wanted to publish a newsletter, and they developed image editing and vector editing software en route to making the page layout software they wanted. If that's true, it's an awesome route to take in life; if not, they (and you) still did an awesome job making software that understands user workflows and accomplishes wonderful things. You've made my life easier for years.

alt227 11mo ago

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 else.

derefr 11mo ago
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 resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!) 3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.) Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster. Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster. Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable. You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.) Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.

bambax 11mo ago

I still use the Affinity desktop apps (before the move to the store) and they're fine.

raincole 11mo ago

Is "Affinity Studio" the version that is online-only and was down with AWS a week ago? Or that's a different thing? (I don't know much about Affinity suite)

InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
No. It didn't exist a week ago and doesn't require Internet, apart from an initial login.
- stackedinserter 11mo ago
  Why do you need to login into something that doesn't require Internet?
  - booi 11mo ago
    you know why...
  - simondotau 11mo ago
    It's functionally identical to the software registration requirement of previous Affinity software releases, except that instead of verifying a registration number, it's now verifying a (currently) free Canva account credential.
  - jwitthuhn 11mo ago
    So you can only use it if Canva has your email and they can send you exciting new offers.

fidotron 11mo ago

It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too). Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.

blackqueeriroh 11mo ago
A sad end because of why? What has happened to make it a sad end?
tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
> Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire. It’s interesting that none of the independent tools survive for long. I wonder if Adobe Illustrator is so dominant that there is little room left for the competitors.
- timc3 11mo ago
  I believe there is room left, particularly as some users would still be preferring to use Freehand after all this time, but Figma is strong in this space now.

dangus 11mo ago

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 will milk it dry.” But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.

truncate 11mo ago
>> technology the cult of the exit rules all Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).
- dangus 11mo ago
  You can have controlling ownership in a company that you don’t manage on a day-to-day basis.
  - truncate 11mo ago
    It may or may not work out. Once you are not actively involved, its not per your vision anymore anyway. And at the end of the day, if you don't think e.g. in this case its very hard compete with Adobe and I really don't want to risk my payday, you'll sell it and move on to do whatever next you want to do. If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
wat10000 11mo ago
How much of this is just getting a skewed view because you don't typically hear about the acquisitions that don't happen? Beyond that, overcoming bias is really hard. An acquirer is probably going to talk a good game about how the acquisition is going to benefit the product and the customers from more resources, better integration, etc. Hearing that, we know it's probably BS, or sincere but incorrect. But when an eight or nine figure pile of money is on the line, you have a very strong subconscious motivation to believe it.

bovermyer 11mo ago

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.

smrtinsert 11mo ago
How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?
- bovermyer 11mo ago
  I haven't used it for that purpose much, but it seems to lag pretty far behind Photoshop/Affinity Photo.
- pwatsonwailes 11mo ago
  Nowhere even close
- mamonoleechi 11mo ago
  Color correction has been there for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbU8FqTI-A4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbU8FqTI-A4 but it was destructive (on the video it is gimp 2.10, but it was there before) They added non-destructive adjustment layers in gimp version 3.0 that can do the same
insane_dreamer 11mo ago
> don't have a good alternative for InDesign There really is none, at least not that is comparable. InDesign is perhaps the one product where Adobe really shines. Aldus PageMaker and Quark XPress were worthy predecessors; I used both back in the day, but Adobe bought PageMaker and discontinued it. As for Quark, not sure what happened to them but they're not around anymore.

iamphilrae 11mo ago

And so the enshittification begins. Such a shame to lose another set of solid, non-subscription-based desktop apps.

gazook89 11mo ago
Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license. In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it. Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.
- sngz 11mo ago
  > Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free. they always do
- girvo 11mo ago
  > Perhaps it gets worse over time. It quite literally always always does.
  - reddalo 11mo ago
    Yeah, 100% sure it will get worse, especially after the AI bubble pops.
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      the ai bubble has already popped!!! the biggest tech companies on the planet who are spending insane amounts of capex on “ai” keep reporting insane earnings reports one after another, things are popping left & right
      - 11mo ago

vednig 11mo ago

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

nashashmi 11mo ago
Without charging for the desktop software.

gotrythis 11mo ago

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.

tecleandor 11mo ago
Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing: Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans: Are AI features available? Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity. Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan? No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts. Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.
- elAhmo 11mo ago
  So, unless you want to use AI, which wasn't available in the previous products, you are not missing out on anything?
  - nashashmi 11mo ago
    This is what I don’t understand. Why complain about it if the model gives you everything except the cloud service?
- input_sh 11mo ago
  Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top. If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
  - 11mo ago

groby_b 11mo ago

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)

simondotau 11mo ago
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.
- sakjur 11mo ago
  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.
- mns 11mo ago
  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.
  - sethaurus 11mo ago
    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.

eboynyc32 11mo ago

Nothing beats Adobe. IMHO.

nguyenkien 11mo ago

You need account to use, but can download without account. https://www.affinity.studio/download https://www.affinity.studio/download

yard2010 11mo ago

Flames to dust / Lovers to friends Why do all good things come to an end?

apfsx 11mo ago

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.

emsign 11mo ago

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

lr0 11mo ago
I don't get what makes you say so?