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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1200 points dagmx | 2 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.525s | source
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gspencley ◴[30 Oct 25 17:19 UTC] No.45762493[source]▶
I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.

This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(

The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."

Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!

So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.

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1. latexr ◴[30 Oct 25 17:49 UTC] No.45762886[source]▶
> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model

They explicitly promised they wouldn’t switch to a subscription model, during the acquisition.

https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/

Whether that is true is another thing altogether.

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2. Kye ◴[30 Oct 25 18:04 UTC] No.45763064[source]▶
Stopping development of the thing you paid for to launch a subscription app is the same thing. V2 launched with basically no new features or improvements and everyone expected it to improve over time like V1 did.