Affinity Studio now free

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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

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

>> "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.

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.

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).

> a macro and game-theory perspective

bro you _need_ to log off

> 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.

> I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.

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.

> We want to prove to be the exception to the rule.

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.

Hi DannyW,

I think it's super cool that you work at Canva and are taking the time to interact with your customer base.

Maybe this isn't the right venue (I didn't see an e-mail address in your profile so I'm just asking here) but can you pass along feedback to the UI team for Affinity?

I personally think most programs, especially audio / video editors are improved by:

A) Optionally having icons that have text labels in-addition to the image (i.e. the word "Cut" + scissors, "Paste" + paintbucket, etc) ; doesn't have to be full on MSFT 'Ribbon' UI either!

B) Giving users the ability to choose how big or small the icons (and associated text) are (i.e. 16-pix, 32-pix, 64-pix or small, medium, large)

For point A:

I am aware this creates a challenge when you make a release of a program for other languages, so it's a burden on the translation and software validation teams.

Use-case: I work between so many different programs when doing photo editing and learning the pictogram icons for each application is mentally burdensome that it's VERY helpful having labels as well. Otherwise I constantly find myself hovering on an icon and reading the tooltip, that text might as well be integrated into the icon!

I end up using CaptureOne for image processing, DxO for noise reduction, Affinity for pixel editing and that's just in dealing with RAW photos for one type of photography, I might use others as well depending on the subject matter.

For point B:

Our monitors now are super high DPI and squinting at tiny icons designed when we had limited real-estate is a real tax on the eyes.

Thank you again for reply on this public forum and many us who are paying customers are happier to give you guys money over companies like Adobe who now only offer subscription software.

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