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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1203 points dagmx | 2 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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. ezfe ◴[30 Oct 25 20:32 UTC] No.45764966[source]▶
> I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model

> to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them

Your license is perpetual for V2, so I wouldn't worry that you'll lose access to it?

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2. gspencley ◴[31 Oct 25 15:24 UTC] No.45773092[source]▶
I'm not worried that I'm going to lose access to V2. I'm worried that they are moving in the same rent-seeking direction that Adobe did that caused me to migrate to Affinity in the first place.

Creative tools are, to artists, like IDEs and git repositories are to coders.

Imagine you spend years getting very proficient at specific development tools, and you use a repo host like GitHub. One day your dev tools providers tell you that they are moving to a subscription model. You can continue to use the legacy stuff to access your source code. But if you choose to migrate to a new vendor, all of that legacy source code is now coupled to your old dev tools. Hopefully you have some sort of export -> import functionality so you can migrate. But this doesn't help the fact that you spent years honing your craft in a particular eco-system and now that ecosystem has deal breakers AND make it cumbersome and difficult to migrate away.

An artist has "source" files just the same as developers. They are the project files that have all of the raw layers and assets that would allow tweaks and revisions to be made.

For some artists, this can even make contracts difficult. I own a business, outsourced the creation of our logo to a local artist. Years down the road, if I wanted to ask her to send me the file in a different format, or make tweaks etc. she may charge me money for that, but it is totally on the table.

Imagine one day that happens and she has to tell me "Sorry, due to vendor lock-in and bullshit I had to switch to a different program and no longer have access to all of the project files that went into creating your logo."