I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.

This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.

A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock.

For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome.

What comes first from Adobe? Pro products for free? Or attempt to acquire Canva?

This is analysis is spot on.

I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:

> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.

Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:

> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.

I tried it today after struggling for hours with alternatives, it's much better than anything else I tried.

I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.

Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.

Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.

PDF expert is good enough.

The original Affinity business plan included selling assets like brushes, textures, LUTs via their store. I guess this wasn't wildly successful and at some point every single person that would be interested in a professional grade design suite for 50€ each (often discounted to 35€) has already bought it.

GIMP is still free. I made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Never missed it for photo editing, creating logo's and other images, or designing large prints.

Related (which is linked to the actual post on the affinity.studio website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445

I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn’t going to need to use Afinity Studio.

I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.

Is it a "loss" if your users have to sign in to use your product, to get monetized indirectly?