Affinity Studio now free

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).

Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.

“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.

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

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...

Nothing is broken with their apps or sales model. There was nothing to "fix" there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was never updated.

... 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.

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.

In Affinity, they’re adjustment / live adjustment layers, and support masks.

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.

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.

If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.

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?

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.

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.

I don't know anybody who found paying a monthly fee exicing. On the other hand, I know people who found $10 for a novelty app perfectly reasonable. But these people to my knowledge have not changed in their stances here. In other words: I see no change in customer sentiment.

The worst thing is that it can totally be a sustainable business model. Many software giants of today grew to their size by offering "buy to own" products through the 90s and 2000s. Lots of software can still be bought through that model, especially games, and it seems to be going pretty well for the developers.

No, it's not that this model isn't good. It's that it's not enough. For nearly any large business today, the thought of not endlessly maximizing the profit for the immediate next quarter is appalling. The world-leading analysts have done their research, and the results are in: just like you said, brand loyalty doesn't actually matter for anything, and neither does brand perception or consistency. What makes the most money is using any means imaginable to hook people into a recurring payment, so that's what everyone will do once they get big enough. Nothing else actually matters in terms of money.

This is also the reason why so many Windows users are so angry that in particular since Windows 10 (but partly already in previous Windows versions) Microsoft made it so hard to have some "stable" Windows version on a computer that only gets security updates. Similarly for the forced Windows 11 upgrade where Windows 11 (officially) does not even work on many computers that Windows 10 supported.

[1]: (FWIW, I don't know one way or the other. Apologies to any Gimp developers here.)

I might built myself a full blown piracy machine that never gets to access the internet so I have access to an environment that can't get taken away. At the very least, it'll be a good way to learn how much dependence there is on internet connectivity, which we all know the answer to - way too much.

How does it becomes useless?

Until there is a new format that you absolutely can't avoid on your day to day life there is no reason you cannot use it the same way you have used it until now.

I think a lot of that feeling is just FOMO.

For it to be a problem you need to actually buy said new cameras and lenses.

I am still using my Pentax K5 II and Samsung NX from a bit more than a decade ago (as well as some analog cams but I disgress).

There is a lot of FOMO + Gear Aquisition Syndrome to make that a problem. Maybe one should focus more on actually having a life,using the products they akready own, make arts or memories instead of thinking what is new on the market they are missing out and what to buy next.

Makes me think of those people, perfectly happy with Airpod pro v2 who purchase v3 ones, only to end up frustrated by their new purchase.

https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/03/16/gimp-3-0-released/

Gimp's problem is mostly one of funding and attention, like most OSS projects. But it's never stopped development, which I think is impressive 27 years on.

Imagine where Gimp would be if any company treated it like Valve treats WINE.

People go on and on about how bad Gimp's UI is, and while I won't defend it I will the criticism is 99% overblown.

https://i.imgur.com/3gqmu9N.png

If you take 10-15 minutes to customize the UI it can be pretty damn simple if you want. I'd say those minutes are worth it to avoid a subscription and to support a true OSS stalwart project.

In a very real sense, yes.

Just like real votes, candidates will collude on issues that are bad for them, and push the discussion on trivial and/or bikesheddy issues people shouldn't really care about, keeping important arguments out of the public place.

To people who ever felt their vote were almost useless and not voting would also only make the situation worse...that's exactly how "voting with one's wallet" feel like.

for the company, maybe

Even now, over a decade after its release, FFXIV subscriptions are what’s keeping the mighty Square Enix alive.

https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/ir/library/pdf/25q4slides...

I'm not sure I'm seeing the same. The gaming industry is going strong, and increasing consolidation isn't really a sign that the companies being acquired are in financial trouble, it's more about the strength and dominance of the biggest companies. And even those biggest players are continuing to release non-subscription-based titles. I'm not saying there aren't struggling gaming companies, but to me it seems that the majority are doing well for themselves, certainly there's nothing so monumental in the industry as to make me think "they're all losing money because they're not all moving to subscription services".

Square Enix also isn't really representative of the average gaming company. FFXIV seems to be their primary product in general, especially in the American and European markets. The products they cite in other sub-segments of digital entertainment are far more niche and many don't seem to be as well-received critically. They also focus a lot more on Japan than other gaming companies, for obvious reasons, which makes direct comparisons even harder. FFXIV is definitely their main cash cow due to the situation that company is in, but there's not nearly enough to map it to some sweeping industry-wide conclusion.

I want to own my software, not rent it.

Except for the odd fact that now you've got the software without having to pay.

Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.

As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.

I don't think I could do that with anything that was compiled for Linux or MacOS back then.

I wouldn't want to do that with anything that opens ports on my computer that was compiled back then.

Remember too that PhotoShop itself is unintuitive and hard to learn.

That unintuitiveness is a mark of honor for Photoshop ("ooo, it's so powerful you have to take _classes_ to learn it!") and a mark of shame for GIMP ("ooo, those twits didn't clone PhotoShop, the fools! It's so hard to learn!")

Getting into the export flow takes time but I find it to be cleaner.

Please omit patronising barbs like this from comments on HN.