I’m sorry but nothing is going to be realistically ‘free’. It would make poor business sense to invest with no financial return. They may not be charging at the moment, but I seriously doubt that whatever the plans, it will not demand something from you. Just having to create an account starts you on a data collection track.
Also, enshittification usually starts once you’re locked in. We’re in the phase of keeping as many users as possible.
It’s now a freemium software, a decision of its new owners. Having to have an account for a freemium software (especially when the premium is linked to an online service) is pretty common. Canva buying what was an independent software house may be regrettable, but that’s business.
All predictions, not certainties. Meanwhile,what do you think of this model…
Have a really different idea for taking on Adobe’s core offerings. Spend years developing your first product, spend years more developing the next two. Only on releasing the third and final product can you actually show your point of difference. Spend yet more years consistently adding features and adding support for additional platforms.
Now imagine this entire process takes 15 years and in that time, you only ever charge twice for any single product. Designer has been out for 11 years and there was only ever one paid upgrade.
Also, the prices you charge are very cheap for the target market.
That’s the story of the Affinity products. It sounds like madness to me and for a long time I worried it was an unsustainable business model, but here we are.
Enshittification is not inevitable, here or anywhere: it’s always the result of a series of business decisions driven by the assumption that the only important metric is immediate shareholder value (a core tenet of neolliberalism) so other values, like customer loyalty, brand recognition, resilience, innovation, social and other contributions, must be put aside.
Canva is far from the worst company in this regard. Their terms and policies are reasonably open and clear and the aggressiveness of their upselling and lock in is very much lower than e.g. Adobe and their prices are reasonable and pretty good value if you need them.
This might turn out to be a good move for Affinity. it might not. We will have to wait and see.
Hello, may introduce you to the world of Libre/Free Open Source software? Not all software is proprietary, built with the primary intent of profit. This was a real shift in experience for me and shook my previous assumptions.
Going into it 9 months ago I assumed that Free/Libre software would be of poorer quality when compared to software that was being sold for profit. I expected poor imitations. Then I actually used it and my assumptions proved to be wrong. And I also began learning about the “factory” which is to say, the community of coders.
Most of these applications are very well done and are still in active development and are offered with a free software license. And often times Free Software is available on not just GNU/Linux but also macOS and Windows. Finally, these are not apps that come and go. Many of them have been around for well over a decade and will continue long into the future as Free Software.
I stand corrected! I was thinking of commercial products.
True, although any business with shareholders is likely to go down this path.
I agree with everything that you wrote. The challenge I perceive is that the subscription model is unsustainable for every developer. In the era of pay once, customers may have had four or five similar apps as they only paid once. Four or five apps that are similar with a subscription is not viable. You then move to a position where larger corporations dominate the market and crank up the price beyond reasonable rates. So everyone moves to a new app that is cheaper as it’s trying to gain traction until it either sells to a larger corporation or wacks up the price and the process repeats. I’m not sure this is any better.
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. And makes my point stronger. Unless I sign up for the “premium” service there is really no need for an account. Or to put it a different way, the account provides benefits only to the company, not to me.
And I have over 200 applications on my Mac.* Very few require an account. So I disagree with this being a common practice.
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* A mindset from my college Unix-y days, small tools that do one thing well. Although many aren’t so small!
I can’t figure out how this is going to work either, but I think neither Serif nor Canva are run by dummies.
I own v1 and v2 of the Affinity apps and greatly admire what they’ve created. I am excited to jump on board as they continue to come at the big green Adobe machine from yet another unexpected direction.
I hope this is not a dumb question, but here goes! I do not currently do any design work, though I own all of Affinity’s applications. Prior to using Affinity, I used Lightroom extensively. I’ve never used Canva. While I have done so for a while, I was heavily involved in a photography hobby and I have some very high quality lenses and a now aging Nikon DSLR camera. I anticipate getting back into my photography hobby.
Would there be any reason to explore Canva if I get back into photography? Apple Photos is not suitable for extensive photo library and bulk processing work.
How about Photomator?
It’s not a dumb question but it can be a complicated one.
First, do you actually mean the new single Affinity app by Canva which runs locally on your Mac or the online visual design app called Canva?
Are you going to need help with organizing your photos or will a folder structure in the Finder be sufficient?
Are you going to shoot and use JPEGs straight out of camera or raw photos (in which case you will need software to process the raw photos)?
Do you want your photos to look the way you remember the scene or do you want to jazz them up in various ways (in which case you might want to look at Affinity by Canva)?
These are just a very few of the questions that could be answered.
Sounds like you need a basic orientation before you can even get started.
These links might be a good place to start, and you’ll be able to decide for yourself.
Your first look at the all-new Affinity - YouTube Affinity CEO Ash Hewson gives you an exclusive first-look at the all-new Affinity – an incredibly powerful, customisable app that brings vector, pixel, and layout under one roof.
Affinity Download | Free Pro Design Software Fully Optimised for Mac and Windows
EDIT TO ADD: If you sign up for a free Canva account and use it to download and take a look at Affinity by Canva, you can use the same account to sign in to the Canva online web app for a guided onboarding process.
I think that anyone who uses Affinity to undermine government operations wouldn’t care if they break Affinity’s TOS.
But that anarchist would lose their Canva account if it were found out. Would they care about that?
Back to standing on street corners handing out mimeographed samizdat for you, scofflaw!
I humbly suggest that we all re-assess our expectations for “reasonableness”
The Affinity IP was acquired. Many worse things could have happened (for instance the Affinity activation servers might have been shuttered) but this is what did.
Our situation as Affinity users hasn’t really changed since the acquisition. This recent announcement didn’t change anything for us.
It is what it is. All we can do it make the best of what we’re dealt.
Acorn is a nice, pay once alternative
Not familiar with the Acorn app. Would you call Acorn more Lightroom or more Photoshop?
Lightroom = non-destructive raw photo editing with database or sidecar files of edits.
Photoshop = destructive pixel editor that can go the non-destructive route by using layers which result in very large intermediate files.
Except that we get v3 of the Affinity apps updated and all rolled into a single app without paying for an upgrade. 
Photoshop-like, pixel and vector editor, with layers.
destructive
don’t know tbh, he mentions
…Its advantage over other common formats such as PNG or JPEG is that it preserves all this native information without flattening the layer data or vector graphics… Acorn images are SQLite database files …
https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/docs-8.0/technotes/ACTN002.html
Would an anarchist even bother to create an account? That seems contradictory somehow. 