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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1200 points dagmx | 3 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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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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1. carlosjobim ◴[30 Oct 25 18:18 UTC] No.45763260[source]▶
> V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates.

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.

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2. nirava ◴[30 Oct 25 18:26 UTC] No.45763391[source]▶
sure. however, it will begin to feel "second class" after some os updates, some chip updates and other goings-on in the software world.

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.

3. julianz ◴[30 Oct 25 19:58 UTC] No.45764590[source]▶
I paid for V1, it had incompatibilities with graphics drivers that mean it stopped working properly shortly after V2 came out and is now useless. Any hardware assisted graphics operation corrupts the image. Who knows if V2 will suffer something similar?