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Affinity Studio now free

(www.affinity.studio)
1200 points dagmx | 1 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.225s | source
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pentagrama ◴[30 Oct 25 17:21 UTC] No.45762521[source]▶
I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here:

Serif is the company that originally built this software.

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2014–2024

Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model:

- Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent)

- Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent)

- Affinity Publisher: print and layout design (Adobe InDesign equivalent)

They were solid, professional tools without subscriptions like Adobe, a big reason why many designers loved them.

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2024

Canva acquired Serif.

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2025 (today)

The product has been relaunched. The three apps are now merged into a single app, simply called Affinity, and it follows a freemium model.

From what I’ve tested, you need a Canva account to download and open the app (you can opt out of some telemetry during setup).

The new app has four tabs:

- Vector: formerly Affinity Designer

- Pixel: formerly Affinity Photo

- Layout: formerly Affinity Publisher

- Canva AI: a new, paid AI-powered section

Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/h1S6fcK

Hope can help!

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groby_b ◴[30 Oct 25 22:05 UTC] No.45765942[source]▶
Sigh. It was a great app.

Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)

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simondotau ◴[31 Oct 25 00:50 UTC] No.45767201[source]▶
To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.
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1. sakjur ◴[31 Oct 25 08:20 UTC] No.45769512[source]▶
That’s a good way of putting it. Previously Serif’s goals were aligned with my wishes. They’d release a new version of the software ever so often and I’d pay to upgrade. Fair.

Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.