I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.
This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
It’s free for now. The log in and activation means they can change that any time. I’d rather pay for v3, v4, etc. than being held hostage with a login requirement.
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock.
For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome.
What comes first from Adobe? Pro products for free? Or attempt to acquire Canva?
I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies...
I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed!
I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:
> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.
I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.
Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.
Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.
The original Affinity business plan included selling assets like brushes, textures, LUTs via their store.
I guess this wasn't wildly successful and at some point every single person that would be interested in a professional grade design suite for 50€ each (often discounted to 35€) has already bought it.
GIMP is still free. I made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Never missed it for photo editing, creating logo's and other images, or designing large prints.
I've used Photoshop forever, mostly for image manipulation instead of full on graphic production. I've found the web editor Photopea[0] to scratch most of the itch these days.
I've been trying to use GIMP for years (since Corel destroyed Pain Shop Pro). I don't do a lot of photo manipulation so I don't put in a lot of time learning. PSP had a UI that was discoverable for an amateur occasional user. GIMP has a UI that is completely inscrutable. +1 for Photopea, it has become my go-to.
I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.
I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.
This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
It’s free for now. The log in and activation means they can change that any time. I’d rather pay for v3, v4, etc. than being held hostage with a login requirement.
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
The login and activation is a clawback option.
A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock.
For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome.
What comes first from Adobe? Pro products for free? Or attempt to acquire Canva?
> Or attempt to acquire Canva?
I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies...
I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed!
[0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/adobe-and-figm...
Yeah, fingers crossed is what we need.
Adobe wanted to acquire Figma for 20B, and Canva is 4.4 times bigger in revenue…
If allowed it would be a huge acquisition.
This is analysis is spot on.
I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:
> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.
I tried it today after struggling for hours with alternatives, it's much better than anything else I tried.
I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.
Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.
Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.
PDF expert is good enough.
The original Affinity business plan included selling assets like brushes, textures, LUTs via their store. I guess this wasn't wildly successful and at some point every single person that would be interested in a professional grade design suite for 50€ each (often discounted to 35€) has already bought it.
GIMP is still free. I made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Never missed it for photo editing, creating logo's and other images, or designing large prints.
I've used Photoshop forever, mostly for image manipulation instead of full on graphic production. I've found the web editor Photopea[0] to scratch most of the itch these days.
[0]https://www.photopea.com
I've been trying to use GIMP for years (since Corel destroyed Pain Shop Pro). I don't do a lot of photo manipulation so I don't put in a lot of time learning. PSP had a UI that was discoverable for an amateur occasional user. GIMP has a UI that is completely inscrutable. +1 for Photopea, it has become my go-to.
GIMP doesn't do 1% of what this does even if you don't have a problem with GIMP's UX. It's not comparable.
This. GIMP is a fine casual image processing tool. Its great in what it does. But you can't begin to compare it with Affinity or Photoshop.
Related (which is linked to the actual post on the affinity.studio website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445
Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext above.
I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn’t going to need to use Afinity Studio.
I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.
Is it a "loss" if your users have to sign in to use your product, to get monetized indirectly?