Affinity and Canva, October 30th creative freedom

No-one (here) does. Use what you want, don’t worry about the rest.

Their previous model seems to be price hikes.

I was director of a state-level nonprofit, and we were on a “nonprofit” plan that gave us something like 5 users for $120-ish a year. We missed the auto-renewal failure since it went to a mailbox that we only checked about once a week, and they basically tried charging our card every day for several days - then they cancelled the plan.

I emailed to let them know we’d missed our renewal and to please charge the card again, and they said that because we were on a legacy plan and had missed the auto-renewal we had to subscribe per user at $120-ish per year. So basically our $120/year went to $600 per year, not because we couldn’t initially have renewed at our old rate, but because our auto-renewal failure gave them an excuse to kick us off.

They were incredibly unsympathetic. I know that “anecdote != data”, but their support people definitely didn’t feel like a company that cares about “the future of creative freedom” or whatever their marketing pitch is.

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I guess when companies grow they loose their connection to the customers. It is so… sad? Greed is really some of the worst things that always turn me away. I was a big fan of YNAB. I bought version 3, I bought version 4, I switched to their subsription model when they promised new features and the best support for a grandfathered price which they promised to be for a lifetime. And then they got more and more greedy and suddenly doubled the lifetime legacy plan prices from 40 to 80$. Doubling it.
And it was similar with 1Password. It is so frustration to see really good software and services go down the hill because of pure greed.

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I’m trying not to use the word “greed,” even if it may be true, but I just wish companies would put their cards on the table and be consistent.

In another related true story, I was a “municipal liaison” for NaNoWriMo over a decade ago. I got a new area created, and we were trying to get local writers involved. We went to the local Barnes & Noble and indicated that our group would like to have a “write-in” at their little cafe. We basically just needed their permission to push a bunch of tables together for about 8-10 people, so we could talk a bit and work on our novels.

They were fine with that, but we couldn’t put any signage anywhere, including things as unobtrusive as a table tent on the tables where we were sitting. This was made very clear. There was to be nothing that identified us in any way as being involved with NaNoWriMo.

We get there the day of the write-in. Barnes & Noble has signs up for NaNoWriMo, talking about how much they support local writers, creativity, etc. They have a merchandising display where they have a pile of NaNoWriMo and other writing-related books for sale.

It struck us as thoroughly bizarre that we couldn’t identify ourselves in any way, in a store that was literally advertising - less than a couple dozen feet away - how much they support people like us. :slight_smile:

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Thanks. Your experience is similar to mine. My first foray into Linux land was right after Apple announced no Sonoma support for my 2018 iMac. Since then, I’ve converted a 2015 MBA and MBPro. Depending on the distro, I’ve had to nudge wifi or sound, but it’s been easy to do, and I love it. Last week, an elderly friend from church asked me to come over to help him set up his new iMac. It replaced a barely breathing HP Envy 23 from 2015 that could not move up to Windows 11. After the Mac intro, he sent the old PC home with me. One Windows wipe/Linux installation, and a little bit of additional RAM later, it is working quite well. It could easily serve as a fulltime household device now.

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Relevant:

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