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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
bro you _need_ to log off
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.
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.
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.