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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1199 points dagmx | 2 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.472s | 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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renewiltord ◴[30 Oct 25 19:18 UTC] No.45764109[source]▶
I mean, what’s the problem? You wanted a pay once use forever and you got that with v2. So keep using v2. No one is going to charge your credit card.
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Espressosaurus ◴[30 Oct 25 19:30 UTC] No.45764267[source]▶
I paid for v1 and v2, and would have happily paid for v3.

The reason I’m not using Adobe is to avoid their onerous subscription.

If Affinity has moved to a subscription model then why bother not using the incumbent?

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renewiltord ◴[30 Oct 25 20:26 UTC] No.45764916[source]▶
Okay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
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Espressosaurus ◴[31 Oct 25 06:01 UTC] No.45768848[source]▶
No, I still want the option of sticking with the old version if I decide that I'm done for now and for it to continue working.

I want to own my software, not rent it.

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1. renewiltord ◴[31 Oct 25 06:11 UTC] No.45768897[source]▶
All right, well you've got it. There's just no corresponding new version. Just like there are no more albums by Prince. I suppose you were lamenting there were no more songs by Prince, which is fair. I, too, feel that void.

Except for the odd fact that now you've got the software without having to pay.

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2. daemin ◴[31 Oct 25 10:55 UTC] No.45770614[source]▶
Cue the old adage that if you're not paying for something you're the product not the customer...

Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.

As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.