When this free/premium with AI thing crash and burn in a few years I can kiss that license goodbye.

"If the paid version can no longer be purchased, the 'free' version WILL be neutered."

They have to remove the option to compare the free, paid, and subscription versions.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...

What bothers me, however, is that I bought Affinity tools in the first place in order to avoid marrying myself with Adobe and their predatory business practices. I, and many people here on HN, shared this sentiment of Adobe. However, I'm kind of baffled by the amount of people who seems to celebrate these free tools, as this is a 101 in predatory business making: acquire a good product, make it free but with an account, deprecate said good product and force everyone to use your SaaS offering with monthly subscription. I might be wrong, time will tell.

I wonder when people will learn the real value of "free" offering by For Profit Big Corp (c)

also remember, v2 is now NOT getting all the features people have been requesting for years like image trace. it seems basically calculated to get people to make an account and get the "free" thing instead of sticking with the "perpetual" v2

That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.

I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.

This is not necessarily true when the free product is a sales funnel.

Canva's business model is not "desktop design application" but giving away these tools creates goodwill in the design community and gives them exposure and a lower-friction conversion funnel towards their actual paid products.

Since they're desktop apps, there's very little cost to them for the free users who never convert (unlike Figma or other cloud-based products that have operational/bandwidth costs for all users).

For people like you who only use it occasionally, you're not the kind of person who's going to pay in the first place.

It's sustainable if the professionals people who use it daily/weekly find it's worth it to pay for the AI tools. And if you're a professional, you'll likely be needing those AI tools to keep up.

No. Because it's part of the cost for Black Magic Design that if they want to have their own hardware and not have the industry's monopolists (Adobe and Apple) make it difficult to maximise their sales, they need to control their own app.

This is what Canva think about their asset marketplace and AI tools, I guess. They need their own app to make sure Adobe can never so much as tug at the corner of the rug.

>You will need to be online to download and activate your license with your free Canva account. From then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods.

As a long time Adobe "user" (read: hater) I'm curious if this decision targets Adobe or Microsoft options more..? Maybe both.

Canva makes $3+ billion (up from $1.5 in 2023) per year; they have 21 million paying customers out of 240 million users. "Only" 8.75% are paying customers.

They don't need huge uptake in AI subscriptions from Affinity.

So yeah, free is sustainable for the foreseeable future.

It's free until you guys stop supporting it or go out of business, then it disappears.

The real cost of tools like these is not the upfront price, but the time invested learning the tool and incorporating it into your workflow.

Krita is clunky, but good enough for me, and it really is free.

Update: Changed my analogy to lure.

Does the account required mean I can’t use it offline anymore?

So can I finally import krita files? Especially those with vector layers?

Also free is never free.

I thought about buying Affinity a couple of months ago since they offered a perpetual license. Now I won't even think installing it

V2 was buggy from the off -- for me -- and crashed frequently. It felt palpably slower and the changes to the featureset IMO were perfunctory (I don't have concrete examples to mind but I remember feeling that way at the time).

But hey, anything that puts pressure on Adobe and makes them sweat a little is a win in my book. Fuck them.

Now, if maybe Apple would actually do something with their Pixelmator acquisition and re-release aperture, both Apple and Canva/Affinity can start going after Adobe.

So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.

That's what they all say, right before they go ahead and do it anyway.

It's also concerning that you have to be logged in to use a free native app

Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.

This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.

I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.

Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.

I don't know you.

... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.

That "nice slogan" is emphatically true.

The features appear to only be things that affinity already didn’t have, right?

I agree it might involve annoying ads or pop ups, but if canva really does what they’re saying (which, of course, is a pretty big if), then it’s functionally identical to affinity v2?

(I also had considered the software but for some reason thought it was Apple only and never bought it for windows.)

?? I use Inkscape every day on macOS and it runs just fine, equivalent to on Windows/Linux. It was pretty bad a few years back but has caught up.

(Houdini is the second-most crashy app I've seen, and it's nothing compared to Inkscape at least on Windows.)

My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"

- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.

- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.

Only if you don't update the OS and/or the drivers.

“Decades” is probably a stretch. Especially on macOS, updates to the OS may eventually break them. And the apps were removed from the App Store.

Most impactful example that comes to mind is the vector blend tool. You can take, say, a circle and create step-wise transformations to another shape like a square.This is found in Illustrator and a few others, but absent from Affinity Designer.[0] I share the concern that a new feature like this will be paywalled.

Additionally, Serif was very transparent with detailed changelogs and a community to submit bug reports and request new features. I have doubts that Canva will do the same.

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tool-techniques/bl...

Not sure if she found a replacement but she certainly didn't want to use GIMP - interface was way too convoluted and layers management weird, according to her IIRC.

Also the DNG spec does continue to be iterated on, not that users will be forced into the latest features like jpeg-xl compression, but some of the changes can be very breaking to older apps.

It was never updated.

It already is. It's an ad for Canva Premium.

I know you mean something different than that. But it literally already only exists to push people to pay for Canva. And they will only get more aggressive with that.

still fine, really. I've seen people use the original pagemaker 9 on an internet-disconnected XP machine to hand-make circuit masks (ok it is just this one awesome old person who still etches his circuits with FeCl3, but I digress).

It's just that I paid for a first class, "this is the best we offer, for a price you're gonna pay upfront" software 6 months ago, and now that feeling gone.

nothing really tangible was lost, but seriously, if the entirety of the Affinity suite was deleted, nothing would be lost anyway. You could still use figma, photopea and the like to get all your work done just like before. just not with the same cohesion and confidence and security maybe, and that's what serif had sold before this.

Keeping in mind that:

1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy)

2. Large ML models require a lot of resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved.

3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.)

Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster.

Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster.

Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable.

You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.)

Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.

Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).

If you get value out of the free part of a tool, great! If not, then you get to choose to pay for the rest or not. Personally I'm happy that it tends to be the feature set I can live without that costs money. Not always, but often enough.