Combined Affinity Studio Now Free
Marcus Mendes (MacRumors, Hacker News, TidBITS-Talk, Mac Power Users):
Affinity has announced a complete overhaul of its design suite. Starting today, the company is unifying all its tools into a single app for vector, photo, and layout work, and making it permanently free.
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Here’s Ash Hewson, CEO of Affinity:
“There’s no catch, no stripped-back version, and no gotchas. The same precise, high-performance tools that professionals rely on every day are now open to all, because creative freedom shouldn’t come with a cost.”
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The all-new Affinity was completely redesigned to offer a seamless way to switch between vector, photo, and layout work.
Combining Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher into a single app is an interesting move. There was clearly duplication and extra friction from having them separate yet integrated, but it’s hard to get the user interface right in a mega app. I still prefer when Interface Builder was spearate from Xcode (though it matters less as I phase out my usage of nib files).
The immediate catch is that now you need to log into a Canva account to use the app, and there will probably be constant upselling UI, like with Apple’s services apps. Maybe that seems like a small price to pay for getting all these professional tools for free. But I have a bad feeling about this, both because it seems like the pro app functionality will no longer be the focus and because I don’t understand how they’re going to make money. Is the subscription with AI features that compelling?
Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):
Canva is well-suited for those smaller tasks, which is why they’ve convinced 24 million people to pay $120 per year or more for its offering, many in workplaces. Potentially, though, Canva Pro could be nearly as popular as Microsoft 365, which has an estimated 440 million paid subscribers. The pitch to employers: Rather than buying graphics software for one or two departments, everyone gets a Canva Pro subscription.
If only the market wasn’t so split because of all the professionals favoring Creative Cloud and looking down on Canva.
That’s where the make-Affinity-free logic comes into play. For years, Adobe’s Achilles heel has been its overwhelming high cost, which has left many early-career or freelance professional designers feeling sustained sticker shock, year after year.
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If Canva can get more than 6 normies for every professional Adobe serves, they come out ahead.
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Canva just flipped 40 years of design-business logic on its head, and if they pull this off, they look like geniuses. If they don’t, hopefully Affinity doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
So, how does a free professional tool make business sense for Canva? Adams explains it to me with a simple mantra: “craft and scale.” The high-end, pixel-perfect “craft” happens in Affinity Studio. The “scale”—where that craft is used to generate massive amounts of content—happens in Canva. By making the craft tool free, Canva is betting it can grow the entire design ecosystem.
The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds.
All was good for a while. But fans got twitchy last year when Serif was snapped up by Canva, a company rather fond of subscriptions itself. Such concern escalated to full-blown panic this October when Affinity desktop apps vanished from sale, replaced by the cryptic slogan “Creative Freedom Is Coming”.
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So what’s the catch? Well, the iPad version won’t be ready until next year, which explains why the iPad Affinity suite quietly went free rather than being pulled from the App Store. And there’s the integration of Canva AI tools, such as Generative Fill, Expand & Edit and Remove Background. GenAI is… divisive (let’s say) in the creative world. But those tools are entirely optional and Canva promises your work in Affinity “is not accessed to train AI features” anyway.
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It does technically break Canva’s pledge to “offer perpetual licenses”, but given that the new price is literally zero, I think we can forgive the company for that. What I’m interested in now is not just how Affinity evolves, but also how Adobe responds.
Presumably, most of the future work will be on new features that require a subscription.
Adobe Inc. brought together 10,000 marketers, filmmakers and content creators to its annual conference this week to persuade them that the company’s software products are adapting to artificial intelligence and remain the best tools for their work.
But it’s Adobe’s investors, rather than its users, who are the most skeptical that generative AI technology won’t disrupt the company’s business as the top seller of software for creative professionals.
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The company’s shares have lost about a quarter of their value this year as AI tools like Google’s video-generating model Veo have gained steam.
Previously:
- Adobe Raises Monthly Photography Plan Prices
- Canva Hikes Prices
- Canva Acquires Affinity/Serif
- Adobe Abandons Figma Acquisition
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Pity for folks who use spaces to separate their layout, and image manipulation workflows. It's a very common workflow for people to use Photo in dark UI mode, but Publisher in Light UI mode, which isn't going to be an option now.
I too have a bad feeling about this because it all feels like Newspeak. "Free" should be in quotes. It will be "free" like everything "free" is anymore. Full of ads for upsells. And even on the paid version, full of popups for further upsells.
The reference to Apple is a good one. The TV app is just a billboard now. Even if one subscribes to TV+ you'll still get popups for MLS or F1 or MLB or whatever else they want to push.
I suppose I don't blame companies for wanting to make money but it's getting insulting.
Adobe brought this on themselves. Their apps have been total crap for at least the past decade. I don't know what happened, but they lost the mojo they used to have. There are so many weird quirks in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign -- where you learn to do a task a certain way in one app, and then to do the same task in one of the other apps is a completely different workflow (for no apparent reason). Or things which seem totally obvious are either impossible or require insane multi-step workarounds. I recently had an issue where I saved a file "in Creative Cloud" but then couldn't access it on my other computer, nor my iPhone. Because saving "in the cloud" on Adobe apps apparently means 2 or 3 different things depending which Creative Cloud app you are using! Oh and why can I scale the interface in some of the apps on Windows, but not others? Adobe is a mess.
I'm remaining cautiously optimistic. As I understand it, they did add several new features in this new release (beyond combining the apps), all without pushing it into the premium tier. Will that change in the future? Time will tell.
I read another view that I think is a good take on this. This is a play for Canva to take on Adobe, particularly in the AI space. Afinity gives them pro-level software available for free, removing friction if you're a current Adobe customer. Customization lets them get closer to the UI they already know (vs. adopting a new UI). And the premium definitely seems targeted as AI stuff. If you don't need it, you'll likely be able to do without. And even if you do, it seems to be more reasonable than the cost of Adobe with their AI.
For now, I will be happy to enjoy the benefits of Affinity's new product as Canva takes on Adobe.
Absolutely no way this ends well. I’m keeping my current versions frozen in amber until they stop working.
This is a crummy decision on its face, because I use all three programs differently and this undoes that. But it’s step one in the total ruination of these programs and only a fool doesn’t know that.
“It does technically break Canva’s pledge to “offer perpetual licenses”, but given that the new price is literally zero, I think we can forgive the company for that.”
“They’ve broken their word once, but surely that’s the only time they’ll do this!” How do people who cover this business fall for the same thing over and over?
The combined app is nice enough for now, but I expect enshittification to ensue. I'll keep my copies of the three previous apps around. Hopefully Apple doesn't make any macOS changes that break them.
