Affinity Studio now free

This is a deletion.

- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.

- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years

In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.

I'm sad (buyer of both v1 and v2). Being a paid app as opposed to require a subscription was the main selling over the Adobe Suite. A lot of users migrated to Affinity for that reason. As the free version will get more and more crippled as they move to pushing subscriptions, why not switch back to Adobe?

I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.