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.
I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize
Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)
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.
I'd buy some of these explinations, except the depth estimation, colorization, and super-resolution ML models they use in the app DO run locally and are still subscription-gated.
Apple has been doing on-device machine learning for portrait blurs and depth estimation for years now, though based on the UI, this might use cloud inference as well.
Granted, these aren't the super heavy ones like generative fill / editing, and I understand that cloud inference isn't cheap. A subscription for cloud-based ML features is something I'd find acceptable, and today that's what has launched... The real question is what they plan to do with this in 2-5 years. Will more non-"AI" features make their way into the pro tier? Only time will tell!
That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app.
The fact that the apps are now free, suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth.
---
Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one reflecting a much more aware/cynical take on how the software market works in 2025.
Adobe essentially charges a continuing fee just to continue to run the software they coded and shipped to you, on your own computer — regardless of whether you even care about any further software updates. (Sure, the subscription pays for other things, like Adobe Bridge cloud storage and so forth, but if you don't pay the subscription, you don't even get to just run the apps.)
But this also means that people quite often crack Adobe's apps — because there's something there of value to run on your own computer, if you just strip off the DRM.
Canva here are taking a much more pragmatic approach:
• Anything that is given to the user to run is free, because ultimately, if you charged for it, people would just crack it. They aren't bothering with DRM or even trying to treat the app itself as a revenue stream. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Especially if you're not in a market position where you think you can win the big enterprise customers over from Adobe.
• Anything that is run on your backend is charged for. Because users can't force your cloud services to do anything without a subscription. There's no "cracking" a cloud service.
• But also, crucially — if a feature is a "fake cloud" feature, where it could be "pulled down from the cloud" back into the client by writing a compatible implementation of the server backend that does some simple thing, and patching the software to speak to that server (either over the Internet, or to a local-on-the-machine background service that ships with the patch) — then users will do that. So you can only really charge for features that can't be "pulled down" in this way. Like, for example, features relying on some kind of secret-sauce ML model that you never expose to the client.
(And that last bit actually makes me less wary of their approach here: it suggests that they likely won't be charging for anything other than inherently "cloudy" features: these large-ML-model-driven features, cloud storage/collaboration features, etc. Which might mean that non-"cloudy" features get ignored... but likely not. For the same reason that Apple doesn't ignore macOS/iOS features in favor of iCloud features: new users won't be interested switching to the platform [and then potentially subscribing] if the base platform itself isn't competitive / doesn't serve their needs.)
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
It's more complicated than that. Sometimes after 15 years, the founders want to move on and do something else. Or they want to build a dream house. Or their cofounder wants to get out. Or they hear the long-term vision of the acquiring company, and want to be a part of it.
Although it's an uphill battle, not every acquisition ends with the product being destroyed. Just look at what Apple did with NeXT and PA Semi…
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 ...).
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.
- 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 will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
> Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
How? First, by that time, you've usually spent many times more than it would have cost you to own the software outright. Second, if you stop paying, you lose access to the software, possibly with no other way to open existing files, etc. You're the one who's being held hostage - not the vendor.
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.
> 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.
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.
The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
Free software is dead? Free software is still there, same as it ever was. And it will be there forever. The more people flee to it from SAAS shittification, the better it will get.
Yeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now).
Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.
Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.
Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
Is it really?
People on HN are always talking about how they use pre-Creative Cloud versions of Adobe products years and years later.
My firewall already blocks Affinity programs from accessing the internet without my permission. I guess I'll set it to an automatic deny so I don't lose any features, or have to deal with any nagging.
People on HN also tend to use Apple hardware so it's no surprise that for them unmaintained software is dead software, because it will likely break 2 or 3 macOS versions from now.
I feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.
Useless? My guy, it’s a photo editing program. You don’t constantly need the new hotness. They don’t break old versions of their files every update like Substance Painter. I bought v2 more because I support Affinity not because I needed new features.
It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software, and png, jpeg and standard camera raw formats aren’t going away.
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.
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
Very true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”
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, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.
Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.
I hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.
Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)
Any type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.
I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.
And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.
And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.
Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.
Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.
I primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.
> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year
It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.
I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
I paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.
still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).
It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.
nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license).
But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model.
I think their bet is enough people will want the AI, which I think is correct.
As a long time Affinity user, first reaction was: "see, there is the subscription", but on second thought, fair enough, well played. I'll probably get the AI subscription as well.
I do wonder if over time more features will go into that premium plan, but we'll see.
Edit: It seems like some of the AI stuff runs on device, they are not very clear about what does or doesn't. That makes me change my opinion a bit, as that's just straight up a freemium subscription model.
I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal your shit for "AI training."
Hell, has anyone looked at the EULA for this "free" product? Maybe it's already doing that.
This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.
Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).
I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was. Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remaining tools, there is no one left with "selling desktop design applications" as a business model. That seems long-term unsustainable if your interest is "desktop design applications" that do their jobs well with few upsells to long-term subscriptions. The unsustainability that leads to upsells and subscription paywalls only generally ever get worse over time, because users of the free part aren't the desired customer.
On the plus side, when they layoff every single person that worked on Affinity in order to better align with something something market strategy, those people will be able to get together and start a new non-subscription desktop design applications company... with blackjack... and hookers.
I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.
Today's Corel seems very much a "use at your own security/bug risk" license-selling factory. They still sell support contracts (because those are lucrative) and sometimes patch the software for big security issues, but they seem to do that on a staff that is far more salespeople and lawyers (to wrangle ancient B2B legal contracts and new "minimal effort" security support contracts) than software developers. Their business model doesn't seem to be as much "selling desktop software" as it seems to be "fulfilling old support contracts for the zombies of classic desktop software".
That said, yes, maybe PSP and CorelDraw will solve some uses of parts of Affinity's stack for people looking for an alternative and don't mind paying close to full price for code that is mostly frozen in time from the late 90s and early 00s.
Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.
They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.
So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
It looks like it is an offline application (after license verification) in he FAQ
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
As a long time Adobe "user" (read: hater) I'm curious if this decision targets Adobe or Microsoft options more..? Maybe both.
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
Until you get a 2am e-mail stating that they've updated their terms of service, and by reading the e-mail, you have agreed to the updated terms because the chances of you challenging this in court are precisely zero, no matter what the internet IANALs say.
No. Because it's part of the cost for Black Magic Design that if they want to have their own hardware and not have the industry's monopolists (Adobe and Apple) make it difficult to maximise their sales, they need to control their own app.
This is what Canva think about their asset marketplace and AI tools, I guess. They need their own app to make sure Adobe can never so much as tug at the corner of the rug.
Free is not unsustainable if there is a paid tier.
For people like you who only use it occasionally, you're not the kind of person who's going to pay in the first place.
It's sustainable if the professionals people who use it daily/weekly find it's worth it to pay for the AI tools. And if you're a professional, you'll likely be needing those AI tools to keep up.
Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.
I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.
It's smart only if their business goal is to lose every single customer they had specifically because it wasn't subscription software and didn't have the AI junk that their customers specifically did not want.
I have a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (I was a long-time, early employee and negotiated this as a perk). One reason I paid for and use Affinity is that it DOESN'T have AI. I want to be completely sure the photos I edit don't go up to a "cloud" somewhere, etc.
After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer.
C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)...
Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for everyone else to stop moaning]
Version 2 has been fine. FWIW though, I don't use Affinity Photo (but bought it too because I like the company). I'm Pixelmator Pro when it comes to pixels (but love Affinity Designer and Publisher).
V1 felt polished to a degree that implied the developers had thought a lot about how their product should provide a compelling user experience. It was also very performant and rarely crashed.
V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).
I get this every single year. Just go on to their web site, call up a human agent on their chat and tell them it's too expensive. They have a ton of offers to get it back down to what you were paying before.
One of the reasons I stopped doing photography was that I realized I’m locked to using Lightroom where all my previous pictures are, and without a subscription it’s such a hassle to gain access to them again. I miss the days when I just bought Lightroom and that was it. :-(
Yes but settings for any existing photos are non-transferable between different RAW editing systems, by design. Even different versions of the same software have to keep around all old code for compatibility.
It’s not all free. It gets you in the door to then pay for the subscription to the AI features.
Also, that idea of “if you don’t pay, you’re the product” was a nice slogan but it isn’t true. Open-source software is free and respects you, while streaming services these days charge you money while serving you ads.
The open-source comparison is confused. Lots of open-source projects do offer optional commercial licenses or support contracts. And the truly free-as-in-beer projects either have some kind of grant financing or else the maintainer shoulders the costs until they burn out.
Does this read in ToS somewhere? I know many professional artists and if they would find out that their work is used for training, the app is uninstalled faster than it takes time for you to read this text.
It says, on the actual website, the absolute opposite:
"Your content in Affinity isn’t used to train AI features — we can’t access local files. For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control. You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
The only nuance I can think of here is that if you are using the cloud AI tools, you are uploading content. But it's largely hypocritical to complain about AI tools being trained on your content. They were trained on everyone else's.
Professionals I know don't want to use AI at all. So if Affinity is really not using the produced art for training, many artists will get a good tool for free.
It requires a Canva login now, so they'll smuggle it in through there. If it not already in the language it's inevitable because it's set up for enshittification now.
That depends on whether they have anything to sell you. Like Da Vinci Resolve's free version, for example; they have something pro to sell you (and hardware).
Is it? It's just saying I presume it. Is there another word that I can use that does less heavy lifting? Or did you just say that because it's the done thing to say?
I must say this is a welcome relief from the overpriced Adobe monopoly which I, as a solo dev, simply can no longer justify.
The last suite with this name had a terrible UI. Canva also owns Leonardo which is pretty great so perhaps this will have a decent UI now that they've bought and revamped it.
Haven't seen anything on Graphite.rs (site is still suggesting Q4 2025) but people on the Affinity Discord have been putting a lot of disgruntled new eyes on it.
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 free product then up-sell to people who want the AI integration, should turn out to be commercially successful.
Really hoping a Linux version is in the works. Hopefully the exodus from Windows picks up so we can accelerate the timeline for Linux support. (Currently using the amazing https://photopea.com for most image edits on Linux)
Unfortunately there is no realistic vector drawing open source app for MacOS. Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag. LibreDraw is ok for very basic things. But that's about it.
You can try Inkscape on Windows! It's the most crashy software I've used. It's crazy because I use Houdini and Blender, both far more complicated apps than Inkscape and they crash less.
(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)
Same here.. I don't use it often, but it is fairly quick on my M2. It did have some mouse focus issues, you have to click around a bit more but that's okay-ish.
Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.
I'm going to hold on my Affinity as long as I can and try to integrate as much of my workflow to Inkscape as possible (even if UI feels like CorelDraw). Also keeping eye on: https://graphite.rs/
It seems that the Affinity apps are removed from the Mac App Store? That would be a shame, because they are sandboxed. I don't want yet another app with unfettered access. Of course, I can still download them from my purchases, but I think there will be no updates anymore?
Yeah, I used to use the app store version of Slack because it was sandboxed. (I later switched to having Safari run it as a web application.) Even if I trusted them, the sandbox would be a layer of protection against bugs.
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
I'm feeling some real hurt seeing this announcement.
I bought the Affinity v1 apps, buying into the vision for a no-BS forever app.
I was surprised to see a v2 app show up a year after I bought into v1 with what I remember was something like a 25% discount. But this was going to be the new forever app, and I understand wanting to get things right on a second pass.
Reading about how v2 will no longer get updates just makes me see red.
Well this puts them on my blacklist. And I am an educator in precisely the artschool they would profit off catering to.
I refuse to teach my student tools that change the contract once you bought into them.
Adobe is on that list too.
The only major non-open source software that isn't is anything by Black Magic or Steam, both companies that have found healthy sustainable business models and jave acted reliable towards creaters and the open source community they relied on in their humbe beginnings.
Been curious what the Oct 10 announcement would be. It seemed most likely an acquisition since they wanted enough time of not selling existing products to avoid dealing with a month of refunds. Appears Canva bought with it now being a single app that is "free" but paid for premium features. While many may rejoice at a solid free options it's certainly an unfortunate day for those who rely on it. As Canva makes money on people using the paid version so attention will be at making that version more enticing over time and free less. If people all just used the free and not the premium for AI, then they would either start charging for the "free" version or take away features from the free version to make the "choice" easier to upgrade. All in all good for Canva, and good for more casual users who can jump ship any time to free options but would be quite worrisome for those who have looked towards Affinity as the alternative to Adobe.
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.
Interesting. Yes, the pro features seem to be just about ai these days. I used affinity’s indesign equivalent while at work and it was quite good. I wonder what the business model is? Same as figma a while back?
I hope the older versions (V2) will be maintained for a while… I can't help but worry about the upcoming ensh*ttification — I think it's inevitable that some day some exec at this now large company will come up with innovative ideas for "monetizing those free users" and things will go down the drain as usual.
I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
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
Mixed feelings about this. The apps were great and it's always uncomfortable when the future becomes uncertain due to a big acquisition. So far, it seems it could've gone worse. Their business model makes sense. I like that everything got integrated now, because Photo, Designer and Publisher being separate with so much overlap didn't feel natural. Hate the new logo, though... Some elegance was definitely lost.
I tried ;) GIMP developers aren't very open to external contributions. I don't consider my attempts to be of low quality either, but the bike shedding resulted in them never being accepted. "It's best to wait until X lands" or "I think this will be part of Y".
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
This is bad news...
I liked the Publisher/Designer/Photo apps on my Mac.
The presentation of this new 'Canva' acquired product feels like a circus, and roadmap is very unclear also.
This feels like it will be the end of a none adobe solution.
Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.
That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.
Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible
In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.
I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.
There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.
And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.
Circus? And why do you think you payed for nothing?
Looks like they unified Designer/Photo/Publisher into one app, will take a bit to to get used to, but overall nice, the split between Photo & Designer was always a bit silly I feel. Also added GenAI features, for $12/m, not in a hurry to subscribe atm, but could come in handy. Cool to see the suite is still alive and getting updates.
I can understand your confusion – possible anger - with my remark.
But you take my answer too literally.
I paid for it without regret, because I liked the software.
But now it feels as a dead end so all those efforts for nothing... in the end it is a waste of both time investment and money.
Cheers.
It is a replacement, the old Affinity apps are discontinued:
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates.
"For the best experience, we recommend using the new Affinity by Canva app."
I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.
I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).
You can link your V2 store purchases by signing into the app, clicking the dropdown with your name in the top left of the popup window, and clicking on the "Advanced" dropdown
There's a custom patched wine that can run version 1 reasonably well, and efforts were ongoing for version 2. Haven't really tried it since I'm not a artist. https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
IF the new app truly has all the features of V1 and V2 of the affinity apps. And IF it's truly free. Would it would damn sure be nice of them remove the license requirement from the V1 and V2 versions which I both bought and loved. And let users continue to enjoy these pieces of software for years to come without having to sign up for this new program which I don't trust at all.
I've used and loved it for close to 10 years now. And it's fantastic software. But I just can't trust software without a proper non-subscription business model. I'm not going back to fucking Adobe and it's ilk.
AI has now devoured humanity, and not even with entertainment if it was in a proper dystopian way. It's just engorging all the software products we love, accelerating enshitiffication. We just get another fucking subscription. Why can't we have killer robots to fight instead?
Any app that requires an account just to run a totally-local app, is also a company that can unilaterally deny your ability to run said software on your own computer for whatever reason they want.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If I install it, it should be mine to do whatever the hell I want to do with it, online OR OFFLINE.
On first impression it feels wonky. I have v2 installed for Photo, Design and Publisher and they all feel much better to work with. I guess I can count my blessings and at least be grateful that it's not yet another Electron clusterfuck a la New Outlook
I don't understand this thread at all. I think this is the first time I have seen a thread that talks about something requiring a new account be created at some company, and a nonsensical major change to a product (merging the products into one, optional subscriptions) where the majority of people seem to be saying "thats ok and good luck" to the company. Worse, people who are upset this has happened to software they liked are getting downvoted. These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
It feels like the thread is being astroturfed.
They removed our software that we paid for from the Mac Store, and everyone is just like "thats fine, good move canva". Serif did a great job of keeping their software working through macOS major version updates. It's another reason many of us paid for their software. That's gone, and people are just cheering them on. It's very confusing.
- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?
- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)
- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)
For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.
I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.
Is this built with JS / something like Fabric JS? There are some things that feel very similar to a web app that I worked on before. Wondering if there's plans to have a plugin API at some point if it is.
I expressly bought this software (Designer, Photo, Publisher) out of principle, against Adobe's enshittification and monopolisation, and because it was premised on "pay once; own it forever".
This is obviously the 'tech circle of life' in action, but... how depressing...
I've always been guilty of preaching market diversification but sticking with the big(ger) players, but this sort of thing illustrates the need for multiple, viable players that all have good market share, so that – whenever one gets cannibalised and debased into some VC-money-addled marketing funnel – there are others to which people can flock in support/protest
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 involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_
“free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.
What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.
> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?
Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.
People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.
This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.
Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
But hey, anything that puts pressure on Adobe and makes them sweat a little is a win in my book. Fuck them.
Now, if maybe Apple would actually do something with their Pixelmator acquisition and re-release aperture, both Apple and Canva/Affinity can start going after Adobe.
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.
1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.
2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!
3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.
I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.
This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(
The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."
Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!
So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.
Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.
Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.
My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"
- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.
- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.
Do you find CD-Keys that round-trip one time, ever to be a violation of a perpetual license? That’s effectively what “login to an account” means - especially if it works offline forever, afterward. (I haven’t checked if it does, in this case)
As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example.
Edit: Just checked out the app. They essentially put Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher together in one app, switchable from a tab. Honestly, it's executed well. I hope it stays free—these apps are legitimately useful replacements for their Adobe equivalents.
I was skeptical about the all-in-one but it's executed really well, to the point that now I really want Adobe to do the same thing for Lightroom (Classic) and Photoshop.
Would be great to be able to switch between them on the same photo with tabs in one app. LR already uses ACR as the backend.
Combining vector and raster editors makes some amount of sense since the raster editor had some vector capabilities anyway, but yeah, tossing in layout/desktop publishing feels kind of weird. It's a bit like combining a microwave oven and a blender.
It looks very similar to what they already had. If you had all three they all were already integrated, you can just switch between the different types of editing modes.
Interesting move by this company to expand into the creative suite space...
BUT I'm curious how they'll handle interoperability with existing workflows... Are there import/export paths for PSD, Sketch, Figma... Without that it's just another silo...
ALSO for freelancers and small teams licensing models matter... a subscription tied to an account can be a hurdle if you need to collaborate with clients outside the ecosystem...
Would love to see more clarity on offline use, local file formats and plugin APIs... those details make or break a creative suite...
You're wrong about that point, it works offline just fine after activation. It's even stated in their FAQ. Of course it's possible for them to change that at any time.
It's par for the course, Illustrator 2025 is 2.8 gigs on my Mac for just the binary, 3.29 gigs for its directory in /Applications for some of its support files, plus however much space it takes up in ~/Library for more of its support files.
Photoshop's another 4.8 gigs for its binary and InDesign's another 2, so Affinity's doing pretty well to get some part of the functionality of all of those in a mere 3.5 gigs. Or Adobe's hilariously bloated. Or both. Let's go with both, really.
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)
Why did they force the use of Safari to sign into the app? What's the disrespect with the user's browser of choice (and one that already has the valid token)?
Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.
Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".
I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.
[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.
The complaining is off the charts! Nothing in your life would have changed if you hadn't heard about this free product. Now you rest sleepless and grind your teeth because other people get to enjoy free high quality software.
Don't worry, I sleep tight and don't grind my teeth (at least not over Affinity).
What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.
I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)
I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.
And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.
bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.
also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
Sooo, the main reason we looked at Affinity as an alternative to the Adobe suite was the fact that it was a one-time purchase without forced updates or all the extra garbage Adobe obsessively adds that slows down each new version. Affinity was nice but just not quite there, in my opinion, as a daily driver for print design and pre-press.
Once they were bought by Canva, whose software I find atrocious, I gave up on it.
My problem with this is that it seems like a gateway to being forced to pay monthly, Adobe-style. Or else what they're really selling are the AI tools. Just sell me a solid piece of software I can keep using forever offline. I can still do all my design work in Illustrator CS6 if I want to haul out a 15 year old laptop. Sell me a version of that for Apple Silicon and I'll happily pay for it.
Seems much better than was feared, though I haven't yet downloaded and tried the new version and there's still plenty of room for things to decay in the future.
It requiring an account (and thus, internet connectivity) to use is offputting, though. That is a prime enabler of enshittification, since it allows Canva to force updates that users may not necessarily desire. Hopefully it's easy to reverse engineer so old versions can be preserved and remain functional.
If I have to "sign up" then I don't really consider it free. Maybe still a good deal for some who need it, but I won't casually try this out like I would if I could just do it anonymously.
The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
Side/relevant (?) note, earlier this month, serif had made affinity free (at least for iPad if not for others as well). Many had speculated a v3 or something coming up… but I suppose “everything is free” is pretty nice too?
(Idk why everyone’s disappointed, it seems clear that canvas hopes the AI is good enough to get people to fork over their money. That’s… alright, as of now?)
disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.
> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?
I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?
(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)
not just identical, the new "free" thing will have more. popular requests like image trace and vector blend go to the "free" but not v2 (which, on its own is understandable tbh, no one expects a one time purchase of v2 to improve for eternity)
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.
I got the email just now about this. I was happy to pay real money for good software as I had done for Affinity V1 and would have upgraded to V3… but now it’s free because we are the business now.
With a big dollop of AI slop on top.
Every single time some acquisition happens, this happens.
I am more than happy to pay good money for quality software to support a business so it doesn’t need to resort to this. Even a monthly subscription would have been preferable.
And if you want just a photo editor, not a vector software, I really recommend Pixelmator Pro. I've had it and Affinity Photo for years, but I find myself sticking with Pixelmator more often than not.
I got interested in Pixelmator Pro after Canva acquired Affinity, and then lost interest again when Apple bought them. They aren’t exactly good stewards of their own pro apps.
I have been curious about Amadine for a few years, but honestly at this point it feels that if I’m going to invest any time in learning a new vector drawing tool (for like the fourth or fifth time), it’s probably a good idea to try Inkscape first. They were working on Affinity Designer file imports a few versions back.
Great tip, will give that a try!
To find it in the Mac Appstore it is called 'Amadine' (without the 'n')
It seems alright at first glance, thanks again for this tip.
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
It is all apps combined in one. It is free. Requires Canva account. AI features require Canva Premium subscription. No iPad app (yet). Still missing RTL support.
what people actually want: to pay the ridiculously cheap $20/mo or whatever it is for Photoshop, but to use whichever backend they want for generative AI, not the other way around.
I opened an SVG file, copy-pasted a shape, exported the file and the new shape was wrapped in a transform tag, which was absolutely unnecessary. Won't be using this.
Once there was a great app, Gravit Designer. It produced the cleanest SVG markup. Too bad Corel murdered it.
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
Hope can help!
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.
I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize
Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)
I'm guessing they are giving the core away for free to collect training data.
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.
I'd buy some of these explinations, except the depth estimation, colorization, and super-resolution ML models they use in the app DO run locally and are still subscription-gated.
Apple has been doing on-device machine learning for portrait blurs and depth estimation for years now, though based on the UI, this might use cloud inference as well.
Granted, these aren't the super heavy ones like generative fill / editing, and I understand that cloud inference isn't cheap. A subscription for cloud-based ML features is something I'd find acceptable, and today that's what has launched... The real question is what they plan to do with this in 2-5 years. Will more non-"AI" features make their way into the pro tier? Only time will tell!
That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app.
The fact that the apps are now free, suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth.
---
Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one reflecting a much more aware/cynical take on how the software market works in 2025.
Adobe essentially charges a continuing fee just to continue to run the software they coded and shipped to you, on your own computer — regardless of whether you even care about any further software updates. (Sure, the subscription pays for other things, like Adobe Bridge cloud storage and so forth, but if you don't pay the subscription, you don't even get to just run the apps.)
But this also means that people quite often crack Adobe's apps — because there's something there of value to run on your own computer, if you just strip off the DRM.
Canva here are taking a much more pragmatic approach:
• Anything that is given to the user to run is free, because ultimately, if you charged for it, people would just crack it. They aren't bothering with DRM or even trying to treat the app itself as a revenue stream. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Especially if you're not in a market position where you think you can win the big enterprise customers over from Adobe.
• Anything that is run on your backend is charged for. Because users can't force your cloud services to do anything without a subscription. There's no "cracking" a cloud service.
• But also, crucially — if a feature is a "fake cloud" feature, where it could be "pulled down from the cloud" back into the client by writing a compatible implementation of the server backend that does some simple thing, and patching the software to speak to that server (either over the Internet, or to a local-on-the-machine background service that ships with the patch) — then users will do that. So you can only really charge for features that can't be "pulled down" in this way. Like, for example, features relying on some kind of secret-sauce ML model that you never expose to the client.
(And that last bit actually makes me less wary of their approach here: it suggests that they likely won't be charging for anything other than inherently "cloudy" features: these large-ML-model-driven features, cloud storage/collaboration features, etc. Which might mean that non-"cloudy" features get ignored... but likely not. For the same reason that Apple doesn't ignore macOS/iOS features in favor of iCloud features: new users won't be interested switching to the platform [and then potentially subscribing] if the base platform itself isn't competitive / doesn't serve their needs.)
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.
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?
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.
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)
And so the enshittification begins. Such a shame to lose another set of solid, non-subscription-based desktop apps.
I still use the Affinity desktop apps (before the move to the store) and they're fine.
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.
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.
It's more complicated than that. Sometimes after 15 years, the founders want to move on and do something else. Or they want to build a dream house. Or their cofounder wants to get out. Or they hear the long-term vision of the acquiring company, and want to be a part of it.
Although it's an uphill battle, not every acquisition ends with the product being destroyed. Just look at what Apple did with NeXT and PA Semi…
>> 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 ...).
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.
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 will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
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.
> Isn't this EXACTLY what subscriptions fix, though? That you can stop paying if the product stops getting updates.
How? First, by that time, you've usually spent many times more than it would have cost you to own the software outright. Second, if you stop paying, you lose access to the software, possibly with no other way to open existing files, etc. You're the one who's being held hostage - not the vendor.
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)
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.
> 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.
Fair, but shareware was pay-once, which many people find preferable to a subscription-chained model.
The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.
I did pay for perpetual access to it 2 months ago! :)
As a windows PC user I am hoping the compatibility issues wont effect me and I can enjoy the product offline.
I just want to pay $50 and have a single version I can download that doesn't need to auto-update and that I can use as long as I want.
That sucks for that usecase, agreed.
On the plus side, there is finally a free modern piece of software that matches 80s MacDraw and MacPaint on the Mac. (Keynote isn’t it.)
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
Free software is dead? Free software is still there, same as it ever was. And it will be there forever. The more people flee to it from SAAS shittification, the better it will get.
I mean, what’s the problem? You wanted a pay once use forever and you got that with v2. So keep using v2. No one is going to charge your credit card.
I paid for v1 and v2, and would have happily paid for v3.
The reason I’m not using Adobe is to avoid their onerous subscription.
If Affinity has moved to a subscription model then why bother not using the incumbent?
Yeah, I've been using Affinity apps since they appeared. Paid up for the 2.0 versions when they launched. I didn't know if I would need Publisher but bought it too simply because I liked the company (and in fact use it all the time now).
Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.
For personal use, piracy is always an option.
How does that work with SaaS?
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.
Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.
Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
timeon_affinity_001@gmail.com
V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
Is it really?
People on HN are always talking about how they use pre-Creative Cloud versions of Adobe products years and years later.
My firewall already blocks Affinity programs from accessing the internet without my permission. I guess I'll set it to an automatic deny so I don't lose any features, or have to deal with any nagging.
People on HN also tend to use Apple hardware so it's no surprise that for them unmaintained software is dead software, because it will likely break 2 or 3 macOS versions from now.
I feel similarly and I hope you're wrong about the enshitification of Affinity, but experience tells me it's where you end up when you start walking down the freemium path. Even if the current leadership at Canva means well, all it takes is a financial squeeze or change in leadership and that all goes out the window.
Useless? My guy, it’s a photo editing program. You don’t constantly need the new hotness. They don’t break old versions of their files every update like Substance Painter. I bought v2 more because I support Affinity not because I needed new features.
It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software, and png, jpeg and standard camera raw formats aren’t going away.
There's already precedence for app deterioration in their iOS apps. Affinity Photo V1 for iPad lost a lot of functionality in brushes and other features with later versions of iOS (e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1725daf/what...)
It was never updated.
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.
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.
If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
That sounds like ongoing work that you should pay for if you want to benefit.
Yeah, but Lensfun (the library they use for this) doesn't have anywhere to donate.
That does make things a bit more complicated.
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.
Serif (I guess Canva now) maintains their own which uses the Lensfun database.
Very true, this is an area that could have a major miss. Thankfully, I believe most camera companies have a RAW to JPEG converter with some basic level of UX. “Is it good enough” is a very real question where the answer is probably “No.”
> It’ll keep working for decades to come
“Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.
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, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
My friend was using Photoshop 7 up until she couldn't install it for whatever reason under W10. It was always enough for her to do what she was doing with her digitalized drawings.
Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.
Learning GIMP as a PS user is like changing operating systems.
... but it has always been worth it for any normal person, IMO.
That said... PS's new AI tools might make GIMP no longer a viable option even for normies like me.
You don't need the new features, but they sure do help. The AI features in Photoshop easily cut my editing time in half. Doing denoise, color grading, object selections, object removals. Like magic.
I hate to say it but some of the newer PS features have become indispensable in my usage - mainly smart objects. nondestructive layer effects are a godsend when you want to tweak and retweak stuff that would otherwise require a ton of time and effort to undo/redo or duplicate layers/groups to A/B changes.
Nondestructive changes, in Affinity, Photoshop and Substance Painter are all amazing, yeah. They also exist on all 3 of those software :)
In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.
Photoshop has that (adjustment layers in adobe world) but smart objects lets you use any layer effect non destructively, not just the predefined adjustment layers (which also apply downward by default, not just as a per-layer thing). It’s like a layer group on steroids. Pretty hard for me to live without now or id just have an intel hackintosh running CS5/CS6 :)
The FOMO created by online games. You need the latest DLC to get the latest armour you know...
Any type of updates (bugs, security, OS support) will go only to the Canva version, no part of my comment was about the new hotness or that being the reason I bought any of the licenses.
I admit I’m not that worried about a virus or exploit in a jpeg that specifically targets the less-popular image editing application, when I have a solid virus scanner.
And I’ll be switching to Proton for this soon enough, so OS support stops mattering for the most part.
And most bugs you just work around when they’re in a large and stable enough product like Affinity Photo
The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.
Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.
Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.
[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...
I primarily use Affinity Photo, not Designer, so my knowledge of what a vector art tool should be able to do is quite limited, so I can’t speak to that.
>It’ll keep working for decades to come because you own the software
Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.
Yep, this is the first step of enshittification. It's all downhill from here. It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year.
> It will probably be ad-supported by this time next year
It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.
I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.
What are you talking about? I plan to use it for at least 5-10 years more. Excellent software that takes care of all my needs. Melanie Perkins is not going to visit you in your house and force you to uninstall it.
I paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.
still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).
It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.
nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.
It's a smart approach imo. They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete (just usage cost wise you can't do that on a one time fee license).
But since they promised not to go subscription when they got acquired by Canva, making it free with AI as the subscription is a clever solution to not break their promise while still introducing a subscription model.
I think their bet is enough people will want the AI, which I think is correct.
As a long time Affinity user, first reaction was: "see, there is the subscription", but on second thought, fair enough, well played. I'll probably get the AI subscription as well.
I do wonder if over time more features will go into that premium plan, but we'll see.
Edit: It seems like some of the AI stuff runs on device, they are not very clear about what does or doesn't. That makes me change my opinion a bit, as that's just straight up a freemium subscription model.
I think there are a lot of people like me who use it occasionally and won't bother with AI nor a subscription. To me this is a bad sign, as free is unsustainable. It's only a matter of time before they look at their metrics and realize "oh look, we have all these casual users who only use the free stuff, that's a new source of revenue!" at which point either the subscription now covers the app, or worse, they steal your shit for "AI training."
Hell, has anyone looked at the EULA for this "free" product? Maybe it's already doing that.
> Free is unsustainable
This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.
Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.
Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).
I think a lot of the frustration seen here is that while Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" that Serif's (the previous company) business model was. Serif was something of the last one standing selling "desktop design applications" with that aligned to the incentives of "selling desktop design applications". With Serif bought by Canva and moving to a subscription model like all the other remaining tools, there is no one left with "selling desktop design applications" as a business model. That seems long-term unsustainable if your interest is "desktop design applications" that do their jobs well with few upsells to long-term subscriptions. The unsustainability that leads to upsells and subscription paywalls only generally ever get worse over time, because users of the free part aren't the desired customer.
On the plus side, when they layoff every single person that worked on Affinity in order to better align with something something market strategy, those people will be able to get together and start a new non-subscription desktop design applications company... with blackjack... and hookers.
I think you can still get Paint Shop Pro and CorelDraw as a one-time purchase from Corel. I'm not sure how good the current versions are, but I regularly use Paint Shop Pro 8 from 2003 and enjoy using it. Of course, it's definitely a rug pull if your workflow is Affinity focused and you have a ton of Affinity format files around.
Today's Corel seems very much a "use at your own security/bug risk" license-selling factory. They still sell support contracts (because those are lucrative) and sometimes patch the software for big security issues, but they seem to do that on a staff that is far more salespeople and lawyers (to wrangle ancient B2B legal contracts and new "minimal effort" security support contracts) than software developers. Their business model doesn't seem to be as much "selling desktop software" as it seems to be "fulfilling old support contracts for the zombies of classic desktop software".
That said, yes, maybe PSP and CorelDraw will solve some uses of parts of Affinity's stack for people looking for an alternative and don't mind paying close to full price for code that is mostly frozen in time from the late 90s and early 00s.
> free is unsustainable
Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.
They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.
So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.
It looks like it is an offline application (after license verification) in he FAQ
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
As a long time Adobe "user" (read: hater) I'm curious if this decision targets Adobe or Microsoft options more..? Maybe both.
>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.
Until you get a 2am e-mail stating that they've updated their terms of service, and by reading the e-mail, you have agreed to the updated terms because the chances of you challenging this in court are precisely zero, no matter what the internet IANALs say.
Is Da Vinci Resolve's free version unsustainable?
No. Because it's part of the cost for Black Magic Design that if they want to have their own hardware and not have the industry's monopolists (Adobe and Apple) make it difficult to maximise their sales, they need to control their own app.
This is what Canva think about their asset marketplace and AI tools, I guess. They need their own app to make sure Adobe can never so much as tug at the corner of the rug.
Free is not unsustainable if there is a paid tier.
For people like you who only use it occasionally, you're not the kind of person who's going to pay in the first place.
It's sustainable if the professionals people who use it daily/weekly find it's worth it to pay for the AI tools. And if you're a professional, you'll likely be needing those AI tools to keep up.
Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
> Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.
your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.
I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?
Unless you freeze your machine in its current state, software that isn't maintained will eventually stop working.
This is how things have worked since programmable software was invented.
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
That doesn't mean it disappears though - it still exists, just in a non-working state.
And proton and the community do well to keep old things working.
Dosbox is a testament to that.
Legally, you can't redistribute it
I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.
Also free is never free.
What changes for me as iPad user?
Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?
So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?
It's not free, it's a lure. There is a hook hiding somewhere.
The real cost of tools like these is not the upfront price, but the time invested learning the tool and incorporating it into your workflow.
Krita is clunky, but good enough for me, and it really is free.
Update: Changed my analogy to lure.
It's smart only if their business goal is to lose every single customer they had specifically because it wasn't subscription software and didn't have the AI junk that their customers specifically did not want.
Yeah I'm not sure throwing away their single advantage (that's not hyperbole) over Adobe is a smart play
I have a free subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud (I was a long-time, early employee and negotiated this as a perk). One reason I paid for and use Affinity is that it DOESN'T have AI. I want to be completely sure the photos I edit don't go up to a "cloud" somewhere, etc.
> They had to get a subscription somehow to support AI features which they need to compete
I assumed the jury was still out in that one.
After the V2 suite was released a few years ago, I realised I would never get the "old" Affinity product experience back -- the same experience and price-point that made me a great and productive self-taught illustrator / designer.
C'est la vie, all good things must come to an end. I'm glad the original team made it out with a financial reward (from Canva sale)...
Time for someone else to pick up the mantle! [and for everyone else to stop moaning]
Version 2 has been fine. FWIW though, I don't use Affinity Photo (but bought it too because I like the company). I'm Pixelmator Pro when it comes to pixels (but love Affinity Designer and Publisher).
What was the difference between v1 and v2?
V1 felt polished to a degree that implied the developers had thought a lot about how their product should provide a compelling user experience. It was also very performant and rarely crashed.
V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).
Ah, that's too bad. Thanks for the background!
Love to see this the day Adobe emailed to say it’s hiking my Photoshop/Lightroom subscription by 50% ($10/mo -> $15/mo)
I get this every single year. Just go on to their web site, call up a human agent on their chat and tell them it's too expensive. They have a ton of offers to get it back down to what you were paying before.
For sure. But "less shitty than Adobe" isn't a life goal.
One of the reasons I stopped doing photography was that I realized I’m locked to using Lightroom where all my previous pictures are, and without a subscription it’s such a hassle to gain access to them again. I miss the days when I just bought Lightroom and that was it. :-(
Capture One is fantastic, though.
Yes but settings for any existing photos are non-transferable between different RAW editing systems, by design. Even different versions of the same software have to keep around all old code for compatibility.
Did your email offer you the chance to pay yearly for $11/mo? Mine did, but I don't think the option to pay yearly exists.
Many comments here that this "makes sense." Free does not make sense! If I'm not paying for it I'm not the customer anymore.
It’s not all free. It gets you in the door to then pay for the subscription to the AI features.
Also, that idea of “if you don’t pay, you’re the product” was a nice slogan but it isn’t true. Open-source software is free and respects you, while streaming services these days charge you money while serving you ads.
The open-source comparison is confused. Lots of open-source projects do offer optional commercial licenses or support contracts. And the truly free-as-in-beer projects either have some kind of grant financing or else the maintainer shoulders the costs until they burn out.
That "nice slogan" is emphatically true.
Yep. Your art is now their training data. Their AI subscription today comes at the cost of your job tomorrow.
Does this read in ToS somewhere? I know many professional artists and if they would find out that their work is used for training, the app is uninstalled faster than it takes time for you to read this text.
It says, on the actual website, the absolute opposite:
"Your content in Affinity isn’t used to train AI features — we can’t access local files. For content you choose to upload to Canva, you’re in control. You can review and update your preferences any time in Canva settings."
The only nuance I can think of here is that if you are using the cloud AI tools, you are uploading content. But it's largely hypocritical to complain about AI tools being trained on your content. They were trained on everyone else's.
Professionals I know don't want to use AI at all. So if Affinity is really not using the produced art for training, many artists will get a good tool for free.
>2025
>believing anything a corporation says
It requires a Canva login now, so they'll smuggle it in through there. If it not already in the language it's inevitable because it's set up for enshittification now.
That depends on whether they have anything to sell you. Like Da Vinci Resolve's free version, for example; they have something pro to sell you (and hardware).
Canva presumably see it the same way
"presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting
Is it? It's just saying I presume it. Is there another word that I can use that does less heavy lifting? Or did you just say that because it's the done thing to say?
I must say this is a welcome relief from the overpriced Adobe monopoly which I, as a solo dev, simply can no longer justify.
The last suite with this name had a terrible UI. Canva also owns Leonardo which is pretty great so perhaps this will have a decent UI now that they've bought and revamped it.
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
Haven't seen anything on Graphite.rs (site is still suggesting Q4 2025) but people on the Affinity Discord have been putting a lot of disgruntled new eyes on it.
And Blender.
Yeah I know it sounds like a joke, but all Blender's icons are made in Blender, so it's officially an 2D vector graphics app too.
> GIMP
still no cmyk, and AFAIK text editing is almost worse than useless. not everybody's use case, but it keeps me spending 12.99 a month for PS.
More TelemetryWare? No thanks!
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 free product then up-sell to people who want the AI integration, should turn out to be commercially successful.
Really hoping a Linux version is in the works. Hopefully the exodus from Windows picks up so we can accelerate the timeline for Linux support. (Currently using the amazing https://photopea.com for most image edits on Linux)
I'm done with this. Open source only from here on out. You can't trust anyone in this day and age to turn not their products into AI pushing garbage.
Unfortunately there is no realistic vector drawing open source app for MacOS. Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag. LibreDraw is ok for very basic things. But that's about it.
You can try Inkscape on Windows! It's the most crashy software I've used. It's crazy because I use Houdini and Blender, both far more complicated apps than Inkscape and they crash less.
(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)
> Inkscape is still basically unusable with extreme lag.
?? I use Inkscape every day on macOS and it runs just fine, equivalent to on Windows/Linux. It was pretty bad a few years back but has caught up.
Same here.. I don't use it often, but it is fairly quick on my M2. It did have some mouse focus issues, you have to click around a bit more but that's okay-ish.
Well, if Apple did something about it... We would at least have some half-assed thing that would look good in commercials.
Pixelmator somewhat fits that (minus the half-assed part). Pixelmator is, at least for now, pay once. And given Apple's size I don't see them trying to squeeze customers for Pixelmator subscriptions. It definitely isn't a full vector program at the level of Illustrator/Affinity. But for a lot of people it probably has powerful enough vector editing.
I see that there is Pixelmator ($50) and Photomator ($120), both from Apple.
Any idea what the difference is? The cheaper one looks more capable.
Pixelmator = Photoshop
Photomator = Lightroom, but without the library management
I'm going to hold on my Affinity as long as I can and try to integrate as much of my workflow to Inkscape as possible (even if UI feels like CorelDraw). Also keeping eye on: https://graphite.rs/
It seems that the Affinity apps are removed from the Mac App Store? That would be a shame, because they are sandboxed. I don't want yet another app with unfettered access. Of course, I can still download them from my purchases, but I think there will be no updates anymore?
Yeah, I used to use the app store version of Slack because it was sandboxed. (I later switched to having Safari run it as a web application.) Even if I trusted them, the sandbox would be a layer of protection against bugs.
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
Developers can still choose to enable sandbox for apps delivered outside of App Store. Some of them simply choose to not do so: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/hardened-...
s/some/most/
Sadly.
For those that don't know, an easy way to check is to right-click a column in Activity Monitor and enable the Sandbox column.
I'm feeling some real hurt seeing this announcement.
I bought the Affinity v1 apps, buying into the vision for a no-BS forever app.
I was surprised to see a v2 app show up a year after I bought into v1 with what I remember was something like a 25% discount. But this was going to be the new forever app, and I understand wanting to get things right on a second pass.
Reading about how v2 will no longer get updates just makes me see red.
You bought a one time license and the app still works, what's the issue? You can't expect to pay $70 for perpetual software.
Well this puts them on my blacklist. And I am an educator in precisely the artschool they would profit off catering to.
I refuse to teach my student tools that change the contract once you bought into them.
Adobe is on that list too.
The only major non-open source software that isn't is anything by Black Magic or Steam, both companies that have found healthy sustainable business models and jave acted reliable towards creaters and the open source community they relied on in their humbe beginnings.
Been curious what the Oct 10 announcement would be. It seemed most likely an acquisition since they wanted enough time of not selling existing products to avoid dealing with a month of refunds. Appears Canva bought with it now being a single app that is "free" but paid for premium features. While many may rejoice at a solid free options it's certainly an unfortunate day for those who rely on it. As Canva makes money on people using the paid version so attention will be at making that version more enticing over time and free less. If people all just used the free and not the premium for AI, then they would either start charging for the "free" version or take away features from the free version to make the "choice" easier to upgrade. All in all good for Canva, and good for more casual users who can jump ship any time to free options but would be quite worrisome for those who have looked towards Affinity as the alternative to Adobe.
Canva acquired Affinity year and half back - Mar 2024.
https://www.canva.com/en_in/newsroom/news/affinity/
So did they buy Affinity and all their tools and gave it for free?
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/
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.
Interesting. Yes, the pro features seem to be just about ai these days. I used affinity’s indesign equivalent while at work and it was quite good. I wonder what the business model is? Same as figma a while back?
I hope the older versions (V2) will be maintained for a while… I can't help but worry about the upcoming ensh*ttification — I think it's inevitable that some day some exec at this now large company will come up with innovative ideas for "monetizing those free users" and things will go down the drain as usual.
I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
Nope. No more updates and it's removed from the app stores.
Let's aquire software that people love using... and then kill what they love about it!!
We have to understand that we're a minority and they're after another market. I'm surprised it took this long, to be honest.
The goal is to kill the product, so people are forced to pay for Canva
If you're not paying, you are the product.
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
Mixed feelings about this. The apps were great and it's always uncomfortable when the future becomes uncertain due to a big acquisition. So far, it seems it could've gone worse. Their business model makes sense. I like that everything got integrated now, because Photo, Designer and Publisher being separate with so much overlap didn't feel natural. Hate the new logo, though... Some elegance was definitely lost.
I'm confused...this is not the same as Affinity Studio from Serif? Or it is? Their website shows something new: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/
This site seems to be the old one - they don't mention their acquistion by Canva in 'About Us' section.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/about/
Also there is no link anywhere for downloading their products.
The current site seems to what OP has posted: affinity.studio
Strange choice to keep the old site up and running, and to complicate things the old site is the top result when searched.
OK, there is a link to the Affinity Serif product on the Canva website as Affinity V2. Looks like an acquisition
Yeah Canva bought them out over a year ago, but it was business as usual until now.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
Holy shit good for them in that case! Affinity was always a great company with a great product.
Unlisted video sent by e-mail to those who subscribed on that mysterious page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP_TBaKODlw
We see that people people love you Affinity software! Lets buy it and stop doing what people love about it!
Yet after decades, Gimp still can't compete even with programs built from scratch :D
If it works well enough for the people who use it, why does it matter?
GIMP is open source if you want to go help improve it ;)
I tried ;) GIMP developers aren't very open to external contributions. I don't consider my attempts to be of low quality either, but the bike shedding resulted in them never being accepted. "It's best to wait until X lands" or "I think this will be part of Y".
Meanwhile, 10 years later, the functional features I've tried to contribute are still not possible in GIMP ;)
so basically there's no more incentive to maintain or improve the affinity suite..
Yep, the design side of the software will rot and die.
This is bad news... I liked the Publisher/Designer/Photo apps on my Mac. The presentation of this new 'Canva' acquired product feels like a circus, and roadmap is very unclear also. This feels like it will be the end of a none adobe solution.
Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.
That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.
Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible
In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.
I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
I loved Affinity v1 suite's offline activation model. Sadly that changed in v2 and the same thing is happening now.
Is there any hope to enable activating v2 offline? That way I can still install and use it when you eventually shutdown the activation server.
I understand why this is important. I’ll try my best to see what we can do :) Thank you for the great feedback.
It would be great to patch the v2 apps into an "offline mode." Then you don't have to worry about maintaining the license servers.
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
We don't believe you.
I've used free Canva and premium Canva on and off for years. Based on their track record, I'm keeping an open mind.
Will we still be able to use our paid license without having to connect it to a Canva account?
>We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
Open source it, then.
Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.
There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.
And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.
Just a reminder you can keep using your Affinity V2 apps. They run just fine on macOS 26.
The real concern… will our V2 apps run on macOS 27 or macOS 28?
I know no new features will be added to V2—what about bug fixes and security updates?
Circus? And why do you think you payed for nothing?
Looks like they unified Designer/Photo/Publisher into one app, will take a bit to to get used to, but overall nice, the split between Photo & Designer was always a bit silly I feel. Also added GenAI features, for $12/m, not in a hurry to subscribe atm, but could come in handy. Cool to see the suite is still alive and getting updates.
it's fair to be very worried about the future of the apps, but this:
> Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
is ridiculous. you (and I) paid for upgrades for software we liked, and then in exchange for that money got upgrades to said software.
it's completely ridiculous for you to now whinge about this particular thing.
I can understand your confusion – possible anger - with my remark. But you take my answer too literally. I paid for it without regret, because I liked the software. But now it feels as a dead end so all those efforts for nothing... in the end it is a waste of both time investment and money. Cheers.
Freeium mostly sucks. Escape before they squeeze every drop of blood out of you. There is a cost to everything that is how the reality get's in.
This seems … way better than what I expected following the acquisition? What am I missing?
And I assume this is a supplement to (and not a replacement of) the existing Affinity applications?
It is a replacement, the old Affinity apps are discontinued:
"Your Affinity V2 license (via Serif) remains valid and Serif will continue to keep activation servers online. But please note that these apps won’t receive future updates.
"For the best experience, we recommend using the new Affinity by Canva app."
As someone who just bought V2 I am worried that V2 uses an activation server at all unlike V1 with its license key.
When this free/premium with AI thing crash and burn in a few years I can kiss that license goodbye.
I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.
I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).
You should log in and download the offline copy of your license key and store it in order to safeguard such things.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be a thing for V2
Oh, that’s a shame. I liked those programs.
New corollary to the maxim, "If it's free, you're the product":
"If the paid version can no longer be purchased, the 'free' version WILL be neutered."
They have to remove the option to compare the free, paid, and subscription versions.
It looks like the pro version includes all the AI features. The free one is for "proper" artists ;)
You can link your V2 store purchases by signing into the app, clicking the dropdown with your name in the top left of the popup window, and clicking on the "Advanced" dropdown
I don't like the new UI. It feels dumbed down.
Linux version when
Indeed. Although I suspect Wine or proton could be an option - not checked.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux is being updated to reflect the v3 but it does work
There's a custom patched wine that can run version 1 reasonably well, and efforts were ongoing for version 2. Haven't really tried it since I'm not a artist. https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs
Older versions historically haven’t worked very well, but I’ve not tried with newer copies.
IF the new app truly has all the features of V1 and V2 of the affinity apps. And IF it's truly free. Would it would damn sure be nice of them remove the license requirement from the V1 and V2 versions which I both bought and loved. And let users continue to enjoy these pieces of software for years to come without having to sign up for this new program which I don't trust at all. I've used and loved it for close to 10 years now. And it's fantastic software. But I just can't trust software without a proper non-subscription business model. I'm not going back to fucking Adobe and it's ilk.
And since it will be a freemium model or ad-supported, here comes one more example why we should use and support free software.
Well. It can now be considered as pure trash. Goodbye, Affinity.
kind of fun that their fonts are Affinity Serif and Canva Sans
AI has now devoured humanity, and not even with entertainment if it was in a proper dystopian way. It's just engorging all the software products we love, accelerating enshitiffication. We just get another fucking subscription. Why can't we have killer robots to fight instead?
Any app that requires an account just to run a totally-local app, is also a company that can unilaterally deny your ability to run said software on your own computer for whatever reason they want.
Thanks, but no thanks.
If I install it, it should be mine to do whatever the hell I want to do with it, online OR OFFLINE.
Wow, completely free? I wonder how the team plans look like, seems like you need to contact them even for single digit seat counts.
An UI design tab next please, some more players in that space would be nice.
Yeah I can actually cancel my pro plan now, dont think I need the AI Feature, let's see
On first impression it feels wonky. I have v2 installed for Photo, Design and Publisher and they all feel much better to work with. I guess I can count my blessings and at least be grateful that it's not yet another Electron clusterfuck a la New Outlook
Well, time to donate more money to Krita, Inkscape, etc.
Oh great, I just finished my year long move from Photoshop to Affinity Photo…
Now I have to start over again? Ugghhh…
I don't understand this thread at all. I think this is the first time I have seen a thread that talks about something requiring a new account be created at some company, and a nonsensical major change to a product (merging the products into one, optional subscriptions) where the majority of people seem to be saying "thats ok and good luck" to the company. Worse, people who are upset this has happened to software they liked are getting downvoted. These three pieces of software are not the same tool and them all being shoehorned into one UI is just idiotic.
It feels like the thread is being astroturfed.
They removed our software that we paid for from the Mac Store, and everyone is just like "thats fine, good move canva". Serif did a great job of keeping their software working through macOS major version updates. It's another reason many of us paid for their software. That's gone, and people are just cheering them on. It's very confusing.
Plenty of people in this thread mourning the loss of the only real competitor to Adobe in the design space.
This is indeed a sad day.
Seems like it's,
- "good job on the acquisition and maintaining some kind of product" - how many of these are users?
- "this is now dead and completely useless to me, I am switching to something FLOSS this instant" - I'm betting v2-decayed-for-a-couple-years still beats GIMP/Inkscape from the future in at least UX for example, and it certainly does now)
- some "it's all a scheme for AI training" which would be more of what I'd expect, although for the time being, appears to be FUD when it comes to local files (surely Lord Vader will change the terms further as well)
For me it took a bit of self-discipline watching the video announcement first, before checking any comments anywhere.
I'm glad I got my v2 licences a few years ago, they've allowed me to dabble in graphics again without losing my mind to other even more affortable products. The strings that come attached with this and the potential lack of options for some workflows later down the line bother me. Just hoping v2 doesn't get too much more unstable with time.
Is this built with JS / something like Fabric JS? There are some things that feel very similar to a web app that I worked on before. Wondering if there's plans to have a plugin API at some point if it is.
There is support for photoshop plugins https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pag...
I expressly bought this software (Designer, Photo, Publisher) out of principle, against Adobe's enshittification and monopolisation, and because it was premised on "pay once; own it forever".
This is obviously the 'tech circle of life' in action, but... how depressing...
I've always been guilty of preaching market diversification but sticking with the big(ger) players, but this sort of thing illustrates the need for multiple, viable players that all have good market share, so that – whenever one gets cannibalised and debased into some VC-money-addled marketing funnel – there are others to which people can flock in support/protest
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 involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.
> explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
> a macro and game-theory perspective
bro you _need_ to log off
You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.
What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.
> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?
Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.
Did that stop Adobe moving towards a subscription model?
People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.
>> "What exactly do you expect from them?"
Nothing. No one asked for Canva. The acquisition is an imposition by a company that has not earned the trust we had in Serif.
You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.
It might be the plan now - but it only takes one Product Manager in 18 months who is looking to push a metric
It's also concerning that you have to be logged in to use a free native app
You have to log in at first download — how else would you make a free app generate any business?
You evidently do not need to be logged in to subsequently start it up. You don't even have to be on the network.
(I have tested this)
Maybe today but what about 12-24 months from now?
You will need to build a lot of trust in the next couple of years.
Personally I lost faith in Affinity after waiting for a decade for a feature requested dozena of times in the forum (group isolation in Designer).
Why is an account necessary then? Stop saying it's free when it's not.
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
Affinity Photo 2 has a few offline AI features already. You download a model for offline use.
There is an on device background remover included for free
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.
This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
Respect the love and the vision, yet don't forget Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy <3 Available to consult with mgmt on how to fight the law ;)
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.
This is like when a dog is harassing me and the owner yells "he won't bite! I know my dog!"
I don't know you.
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.
Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
Look at it this way, this could challenge Adobe to make Creative Suite free and charge only for AI in their product (one can dream at least).
Not a chance - Adobe is too much of an industry standard.
Lotus 1-2-3 was once an industry standard.
One could dream.
But hey, anything that puts pressure on Adobe and makes them sweat a little is a win in my book. Fuck them.
Now, if maybe Apple would actually do something with their Pixelmator acquisition and re-release aperture, both Apple and Canva/Affinity can start going after Adobe.
Does anyone know what will happen with Affinity for iOS?
The current apps are all released by Serif but have been made fully free recentyly.
So discontinued or what? Would be a real tragedy if it is...
It was mentioned in the release video that it’ll be a single app to come out next year.
Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.
1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.
2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!
3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.
It's textbook at this point.
When somethings free, I’m suspicious.
If its a local-first app, that could be very good! Even if browser+WASM with local storage that is a step up from web apps.
I don't like companies hoovering all data.
How long before that's no longer the case?
Only way to be sure it will never change is to build it yourself and make it free for everyone forever!
Though even if you build it, someone might eventually make you an offer you cannot refuse.
I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.
This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(
The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."
Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!
So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.
> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model
They explicitly promised they wouldn’t switch to a subscription model, during the acquisition.
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
Whether that is true is another thing altogether.
Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.
What client-side features do you use that you think will get ripped out and paywalled from an old version?
Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.
My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"
- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.
- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.
Do you find CD-Keys that round-trip one time, ever to be a violation of a perpetual license? That’s effectively what “login to an account” means - especially if it works offline forever, afterward. (I haven’t checked if it does, in this case)
As an Affinity user, I'm interested to try this out (just downloaded). I'm surprised they tried to put it all in one app. Affinity Publisher is quite different from Affinity Photo for example.
Edit: Just checked out the app. They essentially put Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher together in one app, switchable from a tab. Honestly, it's executed well. I hope it stays free—these apps are legitimately useful replacements for their Adobe equivalents.
I was skeptical about the all-in-one but it's executed really well, to the point that now I really want Adobe to do the same thing for Lightroom (Classic) and Photoshop.
Would be great to be able to switch between them on the same photo with tabs in one app. LR already uses ACR as the backend.
I 100% agree. It feels so clunky to do the LR -> PS -> LR roundtrip!
Combining vector and raster editors makes some amount of sense since the raster editor had some vector capabilities anyway, but yeah, tossing in layout/desktop publishing feels kind of weird. It's a bit like combining a microwave oven and a blender.
Combining a microwave oven and a blender, you say? They already did that: https://www.thermomix.com
DTP is basically vector editing with an emphasis on text boxes.
It looks very similar to what they already had. If you had all three they all were already integrated, you can just switch between the different types of editing modes.
Interesting move by this company to expand into the creative suite space...
BUT I'm curious how they'll handle interoperability with existing workflows... Are there import/export paths for PSD, Sketch, Figma... Without that it's just another silo...
ALSO for freelancers and small teams licensing models matter... a subscription tied to an account can be a hurdle if you need to collaborate with clients outside the ecosystem...
Would love to see more clarity on offline use, local file formats and plugin APIs... those details make or break a creative suite...
>Your PSDs are welcome here
>Import PSDs, AIs, IDMLs, DWGs, and other file types into Affinity, with structure, layers, and creative intent preserved.
I think for now, they will be fine with solo. for small businesses
Well, I downloaded the Mac app, and here's what I don't like:
- Goodness gracious, that icon. And 3.5GB?????
- Requires a login (so I suppose no disconnected operation)
- Seems to jumble together the vector, bitmap and publishing apps (which I very much prefer to have as separate things)
Mostly everything I've been able to try in 30 minutes seems to work, but a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times.
Will most likely keep using the old versions until they die on me, especially on the iPad.
> so I suppose no disconnected operation)
You're wrong about that point, it works offline just fine after activation. It's even stated in their FAQ. Of course it's possible for them to change that at any time.
> a 3.5GB app is a sad sign of the times.
It's par for the course, Illustrator 2025 is 2.8 gigs on my Mac for just the binary, 3.29 gigs for its directory in /Applications for some of its support files, plus however much space it takes up in ~/Library for more of its support files.
Photoshop's another 4.8 gigs for its binary and InDesign's another 2, so Affinity's doing pretty well to get some part of the functionality of all of those in a mere 3.5 gigs. Or Adobe's hilariously bloated. Or both. Let's go with both, really.
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)
I was just looking yesterday for a simple vector editor, will give it a try. Sorry, Inkscape is a total mess to use.
Right so people who said they were going to merge the products together and release it free where right on the money.
It being free means it'll eventually get enshittified though.
Oh well, I just bought V2. What worries me however is that it already used an account instead of a license key like V1...
So basically "Canva Desktop"?
Why did they force the use of Safari to sign into the app? What's the disrespect with the user's browser of choice (and one that already has the valid token)?
There is no code in Canva that specifically opens Safari, it would be a `ASWebAuthenticationSession` from macOS.
Safari is used by default, other browsers have to support this feature to use it and do not, so you just get Safari.
Bought the Affinity Studio license less than a year ago and I'm feeling incredibly ripped off right now. So much so that I'm going to cancel my Canva subscription. When you do things like this, Canva, you are sending a loud and clear signal to me that even though I paid a lot of money for your product, I am STILL just a product to you and not a customer, and thus can no longer trust any of your offerings.
I'm so sick of sellouts.
Kind of a bummer. I paid for Affinity tools some time ago, but I guess my license is now worth trash, and if I want to use the new Affinity tools, I need to have "Canva account".
I mean, free tools are good. But I smell a road to enshittification (for example, by offering Affinity for free so you create Canva account, then they push Canva AI or whatever BS to you little by little, and in the end deprecate affinity so you would move to Canva web Pro Ultra Version with 90% off for the first 3 months). Could be wrong, will see I guess.
[Edit] Just to clarify something. It's not like I expect to pay for a license and get updates forever, but from what it seems like from other comments, the original apps are being removed from the App Store, meaning that the "free Affinity" is "Canva Flavored" Affinity, rather than the original tools.
Absolutely. "free" tier is just to grow a userbase with mandatory accounts.
Give it some time and suddenly that free tier shrinks or requires a subscription to continue.
The complaining is off the charts! Nothing in your life would have changed if you hadn't heard about this free product. Now you rest sleepless and grind your teeth because other people get to enjoy free high quality software.
Don't worry, I sleep tight and don't grind my teeth (at least not over Affinity).
What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.
I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)
I bought Affinity as well. If Affinity remains free now for one year, that means that every person who needs them can make enough money during one year to pay for Photoshop for the next 10 years if they want to.
And if neither free nor paid professional software suits you, then program your own or use a physical photo editing lab. Or use your old Affinity software. It's not being deleted from your computer. That's what I'm going to do.
Yes, it did change: I want to use the old apps and I don't want to use a Canva account. I can still use them, but will never get any updates any more.
What you can or cannot get in the future is purely hypothetical and nobody owes you anything at all.
bad take. your perpetual license was swapped under your nose for a freemium thing designed explicitly and specifically to get you to start paying subscription. that's the exact opposite of why I bought this software in the first place.
also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2
Sooo, the main reason we looked at Affinity as an alternative to the Adobe suite was the fact that it was a one-time purchase without forced updates or all the extra garbage Adobe obsessively adds that slows down each new version. Affinity was nice but just not quite there, in my opinion, as a daily driver for print design and pre-press.
Once they were bought by Canva, whose software I find atrocious, I gave up on it.
My problem with this is that it seems like a gateway to being forced to pay monthly, Adobe-style. Or else what they're really selling are the AI tools. Just sell me a solid piece of software I can keep using forever offline. I can still do all my design work in Illustrator CS6 if I want to haul out a 15 year old laptop. Sell me a version of that for Apple Silicon and I'll happily pay for it.
Isn't everyone using Rive these days?
Can't figure out if any new non-AI features were added?
On Mac, the app size when installed is 3.5GB!?? How can we get such a size?
I have:
- Affinity Designer 2 — 2.88 GB
- Affinity Photo 2 — 2.81 GB
+ publisher (don't have it)
So... smaller than both of them :)
Seems much better than was feared, though I haven't yet downloaded and tried the new version and there's still plenty of room for things to decay in the future.
It requiring an account (and thus, internet connectivity) to use is offputting, though. That is a prime enabler of enshittification, since it allows Canva to force updates that users may not necessarily desire. Hopefully it's easy to reverse engineer so old versions can be preserved and remain functional.
I do hope you can still use it without internet. Otherwise the program is much less interesting.
You can use it without internet after the first signin!
I just want to buy a product and not have it constantly upsell me. Like what Affinity was before. Please.
But how will the company “maximize shareholder value” then?
If I have to "sign up" then I don't really consider it free. Maybe still a good deal for some who need it, but I won't casually try this out like I would if I could just do it anonymously.
This is a good rule of thumb
The entire Affinity Suite is now reduced to bait on a hook for an AI subscription service. This is enshittification. This arrangement will also undermine Affinity's credibility as a serious tool for work (and play!).
I just want to pay for nice software made by thoughtful people like a normal human.
Support open source projects with donations and contributions
wow, if they add Good Enough™ video editing I can probably cancel my Adobe CC subscription
If possible, please make a Linux version.
Just in case any Canva engineer is reading this.
so this means that the linux-wine version will not stop working after some random update i assume?
Side/relevant (?) note, earlier this month, serif had made affinity free (at least for iPad if not for others as well). Many had speculated a v3 or something coming up… but I suppose “everything is free” is pretty nice too?
(Idk why everyone’s disappointed, it seems clear that canvas hopes the AI is good enough to get people to fork over their money. That’s… alright, as of now?)
disappointed because a "best we offer, forever" paid software got swapped under our nose for "free for all after you login but we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
There are many many free and amazing software tools in this space I could have made a workflow out of. I explicitly BOUGHT this thing because it promised to be simple and "the best experience we can offer" software.
I think that distinction matters.
> …we'll beg you to pay monthly by dangling features in the UI but locking them behind a trial or subscription" software.
The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?
I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?
(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)
not just identical, the new "free" thing will have more. popular requests like image trace and vector blend go to the "free" but not v2 (which, on its own is understandable tbh, no one expects a one time purchase of v2 to improve for eternity)
thing is, functionality wise, the affinity software suite wasn't unique in the first place. there's a million different tools, many free and some open source, that you can use to create and edit and view.
I think many people bought it because it stood for something more than what it's frankly mediocre feature-set might have implied. We bought it because we refuse pop-ups and ads on principle (specially on a paid, professional software system), and thought that feeling itself was worth the money paid.
I got the email just now about this. I was happy to pay real money for good software as I had done for Affinity V1 and would have upgraded to V3… but now it’s free because we are the business now.
With a big dollop of AI slop on top.
Every single time some acquisition happens, this happens.
I am more than happy to pay good money for quality software to support a business so it doesn’t need to resort to this. Even a monthly subscription would have been preferable.
Ran it for the first time, already made 16 network requests. [1] Not too bad at all.
[1] https://ibb.co/RkVgBFGw
They seem to have removed Affinity from the Mac App Store.
For those who want a lifetime license instead of freemium, Amandine* is similar to Affinity ($30 on Mac Store).
(I have no connection to either app).
* Edit: It's Amadine, not Amandine (my typo)
And if you want just a photo editor, not a vector software, I really recommend Pixelmator Pro. I've had it and Affinity Photo for years, but I find myself sticking with Pixelmator more often than not.
I got interested in Pixelmator Pro after Canva acquired Affinity, and then lost interest again when Apple bought them. They aren’t exactly good stewards of their own pro apps.
Apple bought Pixelmator. What is it's future?
Possibly free also.
I have been curious about Amadine for a few years, but honestly at this point it feels that if I’m going to invest any time in learning a new vector drawing tool (for like the fourth or fifth time), it’s probably a good idea to try Inkscape first. They were working on Affinity Designer file imports a few versions back.
Great tip, will give that a try! To find it in the Mac Appstore it is called 'Amadine' (without the 'n') It seems alright at first glance, thanks again for this tip.
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
The entire popularity of Affinity was licenses you could buy once and use forever and not have subscriptions or anything over you.
Now it's "free" with an account and an optional subscription. Basically the opposite of why everyone supported them. Good luck, folks.
https://downloads.affinity.studio/Affinity.dmg
thank me later.
You still need an account to start the app, so the direct download doesn’t really save any effort.
That's right, thanks for pointing this out.
That is fantastic. Paid for the affinity products when they first came out.
Absolutely great product, I hate Adobe with a passion you wouldn’t believe.
The only problem is in time it will probably become paid, as most things do. Oh well, then I’ll just uninstall.
If you hate Adobe, why feel positively about them starting down the same path?
tldr;
It is all apps combined in one. It is free. Requires Canva account. AI features require Canva Premium subscription. No iPad app (yet). Still missing RTL support.
what people actually want: to pay the ridiculously cheap $20/mo or whatever it is for Photoshop, but to use whichever backend they want for generative AI, not the other way around.
I think you made a typo spelling “I”
can't believe this. once paid $50 - but still a steal at that price.
now glad people can unleash their creativity.
>Sign up to download
Into the trash it goes.
You really like to say that, don't you?
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45707186
Doesn’t even make sense. If you need an account to download, then before you make the account there is nothing to trash.
I opened an SVG file, copy-pasted a shape, exported the file and the new shape was wrapped in a transform tag, which was absolutely unnecessary. Won't be using this.
Once there was a great app, Gravit Designer. It produced the cleanest SVG markup. Too bad Corel murdered it.