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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1199 points dagmx | 4 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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pmkary ◴[30 Oct 25 18:08 UTC] No.45763112[source]▶
I was so in love with the idea of "purchase and own for life" I thought every now and then I will buy the license and have a piece of mind. What started after SaaS is now at its closing days to have fully ruined software and from now on there will be hell like we have never seen before. Free Software is dead, Indie software as we used to is dead, and great businesses like Serif are down the road of being dead. I'm so sad.
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1. karel-3d ◴[30 Oct 25 20:18 UTC] No.45764834[source]▶
yeah I liked it too but then, I realize how little I pay for this type of software vs how much I pay for subscription for services that I honestly barely use.

financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly. People vote with their wallets, and they vote subscription.

It's sad, I loooooved Affinity and their licensing schemes, but honestly... I can see why they are moving.

The AI stuff though makes no sense to me? How many people will actually use it? But then I am mostly programmer and I use these tools only time to time.

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2. makeitdouble ◴[31 Oct 25 03:18 UTC] No.45768002[source]▶
> People vote with their wallets

In a very real sense, yes.

Just like real votes, candidates will collude on issues that are bad for them, and push the discussion on trivial and/or bikesheddy issues people shouldn't really care about, keeping important arguments out of the public place.

To people who ever felt their vote were almost useless and not voting would also only make the situation worse...that's exactly how "voting with one's wallet" feel like.

3. musicale ◴[31 Oct 25 03:39 UTC] No.45768159[source]▶
> financially, subscriptions just make more sense sadly

for the company, maybe

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4. recursive ◴[31 Oct 25 16:07 UTC] No.45773656[source]▶
Yes, that's the point.