Hello everyone,
Good news or bad news, I don’t know, but affinity’s becoming free.
It had been bought by canva last year and they just announced it and it is already available to download.
we own the version 2 and it is a good alternative to adobe products !
same.
I installed this one too. it feels the same. I’ll keep V2 installed for now, until next spring cleanup.
reading the comments out there, it seems that a big part of the revenues of Serif was not the actual sale of the 3 affinities but the sale of plugins, extra tools, fonts…
seems logical, considering it was a classic licence with only 2 versions over… 15-18years ?
other comments see this as a way to bring users to canva and canva AI subscription.
basically, canvas might have bought an userbase here. and is planning on stealing more and more from adobe with this free move. sounds familiar.
funny how among graphical designers, Canva was always the “kids toy” and not a pro tool at all compared to adobe. quite unjustified, it’s a tool that makes a job. but gaslighters need to gaslight.
sounds (also) very familiar…
I honestly didn’t mind paying for Affinity Designer. When something is free “you” are generally the product. I guess we’ll see what happens. 
I thought the Affinity suite was reasonably priced and a good competitor for Adobe. Designer has been my go-to for cursors and icons in extensions. I don’t yet see what their business model will be going forward…
My problem with the suitr. My only problem, is the lack of dimensions.
However, now I have a second problem: I’m suspicious of it.
it really says something about the tech industry when such a move causes our suspicion 
Affinity (serif) has had quite a good track record. the V1 had a very long life, then came the V2 with lots of discount for V1 users and mass upgrades (no money-grabbing versioning there) and super long trial. When you offer a 6month trial, you basically say to people “it’s ok if you can’t pay, use my software”
and Canva… they chose to remain free and have the AI + some brand management tools behind a paywall, and I’m really fine with this.
this might actually be a legit good move. not a scheme. and these days it feels super weird
I enjoyed using Serif sofware programmes such as PagePlus, PhotoPlus & WebPlus many years ago before Affinity & still use PagePlus X9 today. I purchased Affinity Designer when it first came out & then Affinity Publisher, however, it didn’t feel intuitive as my original Serif programmes & took sometime to get use to, albeit, I recognised it was a deeper programme with many additional tools for the professional market.
I watched Ash Hewson’s YOUTUBE video key note speech introducing the new Affinity & some of his initial comments did seem fitting to where the software industry is heading in general terms with company’s offering too little for too much. Some CAD companies do come to mind in that regard on both fronts…
Its an interesting approach to offer the core programme for free & let users decide if they want the so called Pro-AI tools on a subscription model.
I guess its only a matter of time with the march of AI that a CAD vendor could adopt a similar approach with this ‘Freemium-business-model’ that will disrupt the CAD market yet again….
I really like it, I find the new application particularly intuitive (a real effort). I still miss one or two details. But as a result, I deleted my V2 applications to switch to this new version.
@Alan4 Honestly I haven’t tried it but from what I’ve heard it sounds really interesting .
I had previously noticed that many of the tools were the same across the three apps, differing only in details, and that updates usually affected all three apps the same way. I guess they decided it would actually be simpler to face the fact that there was so much shared code and just merge them as presentation aspects of a single app. Bravo!
You could already move onto another program while working on a document, without opening another instance.
I find the merge a bit unclear for now, they should at least have kept different colors
Also there are troubles with shortcuts that are defined by default and unfindable in the preferences. (For example I like to give ctrl+T for distort - at least affinity’s equivalent : perspective - just like in photoshop. Well you can’t override the existing one)
But it’s a brand new version. It’s generally much more bugged than adobe and I’m used to installing updates every month
Edit : I’ve just seen that they added colors to the different personas and that the shortcut thing is fixed. They kind of heard me 
what are the new features
@Alan4 thanks .
Do we know what the business model is for Canva? The most optimistic guess at their objectives releasing Affinity for free is that they’re trying to pull users off of Adobe, and given how much smaller the Affinity userbase is than Canva I suppose they aren’t taking too much of a hit on it. I have to believe that the Affinity team is aware of the fact that a good chunk of their users are ex-Adobe users who got sick of spending too much money, but were more than happy to pay for a perpetual license.
I bought v2 a couple of years ago, enjoyed it although I have my complaints about Publisher. The new program looks good but I’m nervous to commit to it and get stuck in an environment that will be neglected as it’s been released as freeware now.
a quick google search tells you it’s a fremium software, lots of free stuff, a pro subscription of advanced AI tools, another subscription for brand management
it’s pretty common, transparent, ant apparently worth billions.
Sorry I should have been more clear - what is the business strategy behind Canva releasing Affinity for free?
I’ll say bring people to canvas and canvas pro.
Canva is like sketchup, it has always had a bad image, because it’s simple, it’s a toy, it’s not a tool for real graphic designers.
yet it’s here, it’s a solid tool that can do a lot, and it’s worth a lot of money.
buying Serif made sense, it turned Canva into a serious contender to Adobe.
Making Affinity free is a counterpoint to Adobe’s financial decisions (basically they make stuff more expensive.)
And now all the people using affinity have an incentive to use Canva and possibly get a subscription. They didn’t before that.
Makes some sense. Hoping they keep maintaining the software into the future, it was a great alternative to Adobe when the whole suite was cheaper than a year of Adobe (even with Adobe’s student discount).
Late to the discussion. Has Canva anything to do with the once somewhat popular graphics application Canvas? I seem to remember that that integrated vector and raster graphics too.