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I love Affinity Designer as a tool and his pay once license, I'm pretty sure that if you already purchased current version (V2), you will be fine, but I'm afraid they will go the subscription route soon like Adobe and Canva.

Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that.

A lesson is that with the good ol Inkscape that type of thing that endangered the tool it doesn't happen.

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It will probably go subscription, unfortunately.

But the smart move would be to double the price (obviously not immediately, but eventually) while retaining the pay once model and really doubling down on the professional aspect of the Affinity products (even if, compared to Adobe, they're not super professional grade yet). The reason people bought Affinity stuff was the pay once deal. That's how you retain those customers while aggressively moving into a prosumer market for Canva.

Now, though, Affinity is just another gravestone on the path of insane tech rent-seeking, buy-extract-kill, and financialization.

I agree but if they want to double the price they really need to be a lot better. Last time I used it for a quick project (relatively simple yet complex restaurant menu layout) I really wished I had used Adobe stuff instead (paid for a month or bootleg version). On the surface Affinity stuff is nice but it is very lacking in some not even advanced use cases and rather finicky, errors/bugs prone. You end up spending a lot more time, building up a lot more frustration than you would with Adobe tools.

Adobe is stupid expensive for someone who do not make money off it, but their software are quite good all things considered…