Affinity Studio Now Free
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Canva has acquired Affinity and released Affinity Studio as a free, account-based application with optional premium features, sparking debate among users about the implications for the software's future and the value of their previous investments.
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And I assume this is a supplement to (and not a replacement of) the existing Affinity applications?
"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."
When this free/premium with AI thing crash and burn in a few years I can kiss that license goodbye.
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).
"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 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.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
You bought those licenses with terms that you preferred and those terms are being honored so it seems like everything worked well.
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.
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
Just because people have been asking for features doesn't mean your perpetual license is owed those features??? That's an incredible amount of entitlement.
we went from v1 -> v2 -> "free" + subscription, where "free" is unsustainable in the current economic climate and they WILL have to pull shady stuff once all the AI bubble money disappears.
Give it some time and suddenly that free tier shrinks or requires a subscription to continue.
I'd love to have an an easy way to wrap that sandbox around non-app-store applications.
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.
Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.
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.
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.
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.
As a professional book designer and graphic design professor, I am sorry but I can’t rely to switch my main tools (and student guidance) over policy claim from Canva.
I totally get that inference and maintaining software is very costly. If the business model is only oriented toward AI tools, a very good proof of good faith would be to open source and provide a pay-per-use AI API. I have no doubts that a good part of the graphic design community would quickly shift to free as in free speech tools with a foreseeable future. We desperately need a Blender for DTP…
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.
Open source it, then.
> 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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
Freemium with AI and collab locked seems fine to me. I just hope they keep it that way, naive as I may be.
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.
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).
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.
In my experience, senior sales/revenue/whatever leaders see the free version as competing with the sales motion, not as a funnel (regardless of the reality). And argue to limit it more and more for short term conversion improvements.
>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.
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.
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.
Plus it directly attacks Adobe's moat if a solid desktop app competitor is free
This has a reasonable shot at eliminating reasons for designers to pass complex work back to Adobe's suite. If they disrupt Adobe's dominance at the professional end of the market, it puts Canva in a very comfortable position.
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.
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.
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.
It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.
Dosbox is a testament to that.
The original iOS version worked. Maybe don't update iOS if you want to continue using affinity's software?
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.
Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?
So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?
Also free is never free.
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.
I assumed the jury was still out in that one.
I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it
I think we need to stop saying that quote since the existence of subscription. Can you stop Google from tracking you or let you define your “algorithm” if you have purchased YouTube Premium and one of the Google Drive plans? I really doubt.
I think it is the value of the company matters. If their intentions is to keep investors happy, the users are always the product no matter paying or not. By contrast, there are quite a lot of free open source software doing the same for free, but the users still remain user.
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]
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).
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...
>Import PSDs, AIs, IDMLs, DWGs, and other file types into Affinity, with structure, layers, and creative intent preserved.
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)
Feels also more European since it is from Ukraine, supporting them feels good!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
bro you _need_ to log off
You’ll be the first. It’s an empty promise that can’t / won’t be fulfilled unless it’s a legally binding deal with compensation to users if the deal changes.
I bought v1 + v2 and, by most measures, settled for an inferior product to get a perpetual license. I won’t use the new one for “free” because it’s not. The cost is the very likely scenario of getting rug pulled in the future.
The day the v2 license server shuts down I’ll be asking for a refund.
I actually can't but I'd welcome hearing more about the strategy. I suspect what you're alluding to is maybe an open-core model? Generate free value for the entire ecosystem and then capture a portion of it with value-adding paid features? I'd be interested in that but I don't see where the FOSS layer is here.
> I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding
I also want to do mission-driven and moral work in the tech industry but I think there may be a disconnect between how the general population sees the tech industry and how it sees itself. This is my motivation to make these comments; not to be antagonistic and unpleasant for no reason but to attempt to hold up a mirror and show the tech industry the crisis of confidence that it faces. It would be like Philip Morris - after decades of subverting science and pushing cigarettes - launching a vape and expecting to receive the benefit of the doubt that the product has no downsides. Gone are the days of Silicon Valley being the warm and cuddly companies saving the world from their beanbags and open concept offices.
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.
Nothing. No one asked for Canva. The acquisition is an imposition by a company that has not earned the trust we had in Serif.
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.
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.
That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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