Affinity Studio now free

Nooooooo!

I'm a loyal Serif customer and paid for their software. I LOVE Affinity. And I HATE "free" commercial products because they need to extract revenue from subscription services, ads, data selling etc.

This is the first step toward making Affinity become another rental application like Photoshop. Escaping Adobe's predatory business model is exactly why I became a Serif customer in the first place.

I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva.

This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.

We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.

AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription.

I understand why you feel that way. Having being involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.

I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3

I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.

So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.

I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.

On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.