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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1200 points dagmx | 7 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 1.525s | source | bottom
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mns ◴[30 Oct 25 17:21 UTC] No.45762506[source]▶
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.

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).

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t-writescode ◴[30 Oct 25 17:23 UTC] No.45762554[source]▶
[flagged]
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1. latexr ◴[30 Oct 25 17:36 UTC] No.45762727[source]▶
> 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.

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2. carlosjobim ◴[30 Oct 25 18:22 UTC] No.45763320[source]▶
If you are dependent on certain software you don't upgrade your OS until you are 100% sure that the software will continue to work. Especially money-making software like pro photo editing tools. If needed, you keep old machines around especially for that software.
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3. timeon ◴[30 Oct 25 18:44 UTC] No.45763680[source]▶
This is the reason I kept 32bit mbp/macos around in order to use old pre-CCloud Adobe. Then I've found Affinity and was able to move on... Should have started already with Inkscape at that time I guess.
4. TeMPOraL ◴[30 Oct 25 19:04 UTC] No.45763952[source]▶
Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely.

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.

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5. aleph_minus_one ◴[30 Oct 25 21:29 UTC] No.45765613{3}[source]▶
Historically, Windows versions had excellent backwards compatibility, so at least in the past, this was much less of a problem in the Windows world than in the macOS world.

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.

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6. TeMPOraL ◴[31 Oct 25 09:00 UTC] No.45769829{4}[source]▶
Windows itself has a great backwards compatibility story - but the Internet doesn't, so the moment you have to communicate with the outside world, you need to deal with the high churn culture of modern software.
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7. daemin ◴[31 Oct 25 11:02 UTC] No.45770664{5}[source]▶
I can still run my old executables that I compiled back in 2002 and 2003 on my current Windows computers.

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.