Affinity Studio now free

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)

Man. This is another case in favor of open source. OSS may take years to get there but it doesn't go poof in one sudden day either.

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 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?

How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?

Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license.

In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it.

Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.

A sad end because of why? What has happened to make it a sad end?

Perhaps they know that a large buyout will help their employees for various reasons, and they set aside their ego to take care of them.

A company that hasn’t sold out is Adobe— are we in love with Adobe?

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.

Because it’s not inevitable. I know it’s the fashion on HN to say it’s inevitable, but it’s not, and if it were, then it would be inevitable for all companies, including those who didn’t exit, which would mean those companies would fold, which would make it a capitalism problem, not a “founders exit” problem.

Either way, trying to place blame on individual people is kind of silly.

> 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, so the vendor is already better off. 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.

As a hobbyist, I shudder to think that my total annual bill would be if all the software I use every now and then had a subscription model. It would be well in excess of $5,000/year.

Subscriptions often don’t allow continuing use of even existing versions of the product after you stop paying - it’s not just about access to future updates.

The main exceptions are subscriptions that are explicitly for support and maintenance contracts on top of a perpetual license. There are also a few unusual business models, like JetBrains offer for subscriptions that last at least 12 months which grants a perpetual fallback license of the major versions (including future minor versions) that were current during any part of the subscription up through 12 months before cancellation.

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)

It’s other way around, issue exists because of subscriptions and everyone rushing to subscription bandwagon

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.

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 wonder if you get some type of compensation if you paid recently.

yeah I liked it too but then, I realize how little I pay for this type of software vs how much I pay for subscription for services that I honestly barely use.

financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly. People vote with their wallets, and they vote subscription.

It's sad, I loooooved Affinity and their licensing schemes, but honestly... I can see why they are moving.

The AI stuff though makes no sense to me? How many people will actually use it? But then I am mostly programmer and I use these tools only time to time.

This seems fatalist. Free software isn't dead, and indie software hasn't died because the notion of "purchase and own for life" isn't a sustainable business model.

In the 1980s, buying a new computer often meant buying compatible copies of software you already owned. It was a treadmill of support that did keep computing alive, but also prevented ordinary people from investing into the hobby as fully as they liked. Many of the boutique developers from the 80s would go out of business in the 1990s, when home computing proliferated to the point that they couldn't profit. Both FOSS and commercial software development persisted, despite the predictions of unfathomable hellscapes by the advocates of Franklin Computer et. al.

In my opinion, what changed was customer sentiment. 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of the iPhone, paying $5/month for a SaaS or $10 for a novelty app was exciting. There was a (naive) belief that spending "the cost of a cup of coffee" would contribute to the betterment of society once Apple and Mastercard had taken their cut. But it never panned out. Brand loyalty is as foolish in software as it is in hardware.

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.

They seemed to disagree with you.

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.

How does that work with SaaS?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

>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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Yeah I'm not sure throwing away their single advantage (that's not hyperbole) over Adobe is a smart play

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).

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.

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.

"presumably" doing a lot of heavy lifting

Capture One is fantastic, though.

Thanks for posting, I hadn't even heard of this

Most of Blender's icons are actually made in Penpot which is also what the Blender foundation uses for UI prototyping. The brush icons are made in Blender though!

https://penpot.app/penpothub/libraries-templates/blender-con...

https://code.blender.org/2024/11/new-brush-thumbnails/

> 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.

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.)

Well, if Apple did something about it... We would at least have some half-assed thing that would look good in commercials.

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/

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-...

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

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?

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

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux is being updated to reflect the v3 but it does work

Older versions historically haven’t worked very well, but I’ve not tried with newer copies.

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)

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.

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

I 100% agree. It feels so clunky to do the LR -> PS -> LR roundtrip!

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.

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.

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

Why is an account necessary then? Stop saying it's free when it's not.

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).

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.

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.

That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.

> 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 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.

Not a chance - Adobe is too much of 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.

How long before that's no longer the case?

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.

You can use it without internet after the first signin!

I'd love to do that, but I haven't seen any projects that have the polish and cohesive vision that I feel pro art / design tools should have. Apps like Inkscape and GIMP have always felt pretty rough around the edges and unpleasant to me, in a way that money won't help.

Can you recommend any?

i would gladly pay $500 for GIMP if i felt their developers would prioritize features that i actually need out of an image manipulation program. they never have and by the looks of things, they never will. it's too bad.

> …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.)

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?

That's right, thanks for pointing this out.

Yes, this is it.

Affinity is a series of products by Serif Labs; which were acquired by Canva about a year ago.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-...

Canva bought Affinity.

Doesn’t even make sense. If you need an account to download, then before you make the account there is nothing to trash.

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)