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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1199 points dagmx | 1 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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grishka ◴[30 Oct 25 17:46 UTC] No.45762843[source]▶
For personal use, piracy is always an option.
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timeon ◴[30 Oct 25 18:38 UTC] No.45763583[source]▶
How does that work with SaaS?
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1. donmcronald ◴[30 Oct 25 21:49 UTC] No.45765791{3}[source]▶
I've been thinking about this lately. It's really difficult to understand where your dependencies are with modern software.

I might built myself a full blown piracy machine that never gets to access the internet so I have access to an environment that can't get taken away. At the very least, it'll be a good way to learn how much dependence there is on internet connectivity, which we all know the answer to - way too much.