Affinity Studio now free

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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The Affinity apps are great but there are some critical missing features that have been on the back burner for years.

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...