I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize

Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)

Personally I think it's great I both get the app for free and they remove all the AI from it. Couldn't get any better!

On the other hand, Adobe Photoshop has been amazing for years and I'd argue Affinity has already beaten them at their game. Now Adobe is pivoting to integrating AI tooling into their programs which I don't want and so if Affinity wants to try taking on Adobe on AI too but needs to charge for it, I'm all game.

I am unclear on the problem: are the apps, previously free, significantly more limited than their prior free versions unless/until you also purchase a subscription for the CanvaAI portions?

That aside, this isn’t a new thing for Canva, they aren’t chasing AI here, in this space GenAI is chasing the use case that Canva has been filling for a while, and incorporating genai as part of that is just, you know, “hey lots of people use this ai tool for design work now so maybe we add one because like it or not it’s how thing are”. Design is the Canva space, it’s not like they did a pivot to crypto.

To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.”

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. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!)

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.

Man. This is another case in favor of open source. OSS may take years to get there but it doesn't go poof in one sudden day either.

there is genuinely no pleasing some people

What will you recommend to people instead?

Wow. They paywall something that used to be free? You're mad. They give you something free that used to be paid, you're STILL mad! Incredible!

I just want to say "thank you." I use Affinity Publisher 2 (and used the first version) on a daily basis, and it's been amazing. I think I heard once that Affinity started because the founders wanted to publish a newsletter, and they developed image editing and vector editing software en route to making the page layout software they wanted. If that's true, it's an awesome route to take in life; if not, they (and you) still did an awesome job making software that understands user workflows and accomplishes wonderful things. You've made my life easier for years.

I got the impression there was a disconnect between product and eng teams based on quite a few spicy responses from Serif on the forums. Was that the case?

Nothing is free.

If they can't monetize the product with ai subscriptions they sure as hell will end up monetizing their users and their content.

You have to wonder though - why in the world would they offer it for free? They must have a trick up their sleeve.

Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing:

  Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans

And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans:

  Are AI features available?
  Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity.

  Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan?
  No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts.

Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.

Right at this moment the situation is great (basically the same thing but for free!), but this does look like the beginning of a spiral of enshittification.

I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.

It doesn't come close to InDesign, but for some purposes Scribus [1] might be a viable alternative. I use it (in combination with a lot of Python scripting) to produce a printed diary every year.

[1] https://www.scribus.net/

How is modern gimp compared to ps or affinity wrt photo editing? Thinking things like color correction, shadow highlights, maybe generative fill?

> don't have a good alternative for InDesign

There really is none, at least not that is comparable. InDesign is perhaps the one product where Adobe really shines.

Aldus PageMaker and Quark XPress were worthy predecessors; I used both back in the day, but Adobe bought PageMaker and discontinued it. As for Quark, not sure what happened to them but they're not around anymore.

I only needed InDesign to generate print files for some publishers and Scribus fills that gap for me.

After using InDesign CS6 for many years, (small-scale print/publishing), and trying Affinity Publisher for a time, I stumbled across VivaDesigner a while ago: https://viva.systems/designer/

I don't know how it compares to QuarkXpress, but it's a pretty good commercial replacement for InDesign / Publisher in my personal opinion: it has decent typography, styles, and good options for PDF/X-4 export (with FOGRA39 as a destination etc). I've also successfully imported .idml

They have various perpetual / subscription options (I'm on a commercial perpetual licence), a decent trial version, and they even do a Linux version, which works great for me on Mageia9.

I've contacted their support a few times, and they've been very responsive, professional and helpful, which was a pleasant surprise.

No. It didn't exist a week ago and doesn't require Internet, apart from an initial login.

In this case their work is getting a whole lot more impact as people are getting it for free and there is a huge marketing team behind it. If I was an engineer at this company I would be thrilled.

How much of this is just getting a skewed view because you don't typically hear about the acquisitions that don't happen?

Beyond that, overcoming bias is really hard. An acquirer is probably going to talk a good game about how the acquisition is going to benefit the product and the customers from more resources, better integration, etc. Hearing that, we know it's probably BS, or sincere but incorrect. But when an eight or nine figure pile of money is on the line, you have a very strong subconscious motivation to believe it.

It's a lesson as old as history: You either exit a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.

Perhaps they know that a large buyout will help their employees for various reasons, and they set aside their ego to take care of them.

A company that hasn’t sold out is Adobe— are we in love with Adobe?

It's more complicated than that. Sometimes after 15 years, the founders want to move on and do something else. Or they want to build a dream house. Or their cofounder wants to get out. Or they hear the long-term vision of the acquiring company, and want to be a part of it.

Although it's an uphill battle, not every acquisition ends with the product being destroyed. Just look at what Apple did with NeXT and PA Semi…

>> technology the cult of the exit rules all

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 ...).

You can remain in control and continue to make good quality software, but that means staying small, very small, like a handful of people small. There are numerous software providers like that still making niche software.

Because it’s not inevitable. I know it’s the fashion on HN to say it’s inevitable, but it’s not, and if it were, then it would be inevitable for all companies, including those who didn’t exit, which would mean those companies would fold, which would make it a capitalism problem, not a “founders exit” problem.

Either way, trying to place blame on individual people is kind of silly.

Without charging for the desktop software.

To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.

Gathered from the FAQ, you only pay if you want Canva AI features. Yes, you create a Canva account, which is free, so that you can get your license. With old affinity, you also needed an account to receive the license.

In the new UI the ai features are tucked into an additional “studio” like how layout, raster, and vector are individual studios. You can choose which studios have a visible toggle, so you can hide the Canva AI toggle if you don’t want to see it.

Perhaps it gets worse over time. But right now, they’ve just made it free.