If they change to a subscription business model, they will lose me as a customer forever.
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Canva Acquires Serif's Affinity Apps
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Same applies to me, and reading through this thread.. many others.
For the last two years Lightroom has had the ability to one-click auto-mask people (single or groups), faces, eyes, sky, objects (violins, dogs, lights, cars, anything), background, etc. And the ability to subtract objects (like people) from masked areas. It works incredibly well - and is almost magic-like. And is a HUGE time-saver.
I first started with Aperture long ago, before LR came out. It did to the extent a hi-res tiff was first created from the raw file, from which edits were applied. That hi-res (large memory) tiff then "traveled" with the unmodified RAW file (thus the RAW file was not modified/destructed). A real kludge. Adobe's method was/is far better in that intermediate tiffs were not created and sucking more memory. And that's why I immediately switched to LR as soon as it was introduced, and also knowing that Adobe's primary business is about image science. And Apple's was about computers and phones, and thus knowing Aperture would not have a long life. Switching was the best decision I ever made.
I played around with C1 and didn't like it. Also... at that point in time I had many tens of thousands of edited RAWs from LR. And there was no way for those edits to be automatically converted to C1. There was no way I was going to re-edit them - that would take a HUGE amount of time, and with no benefit.
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It would be nice if it were, but Serif's Affinty Sutie was always aimed at amateurs and hobbyists who didn't have the money for Adobe products. Affinty Designer never reached Illustrator, but the new VectorStyler is on a good path.
I run Little Snitch, so I can see when the Affinity apps try to call home. When I first bought my Affinity license, I allowed the apps to make that connection for initial registration. Since then I have Little Snitch block it, and I haven't noticed any issues with things not working in the apps or any kind of messages in the apps complaining about not having an internet connection. So they may be trying to authenticate, but don't stop working if they can't.
Canva is "AI-powered." That plus the use of the word "democratisation" in the release from Serif's CEO frightens the f out of me.
This is fine. For the cover design work I use Affinity for, it works great, and works great on the latest Mac OS. I'll make sure to download an extra copy to have when I buy my next apple desktop in the next 12 months, (Probably a mac studio if they get M3 chips) and from there, even if they switch to a subscription service or "add new features" it won't matter to me I have a stable version now, that does what i want it to do, because I paid for it once.
What is so terrible about US$299.00 for professional software?
I seem to remember Adobe charging that much for their upgrades.
As a working designer and creative studio owner for 25 years, this thread is a laugh riot. The Serif apps were largely market failures and Serif the company was known to be losing money. Canva has a beach head targeting professionals in business/marketing settings and projects a tier below requiring the lift of an agency or creative department. Guaranteed they will steer what remains of the Affinity Suite in that direction, as a service offering. They would be fools not to.
When I found Affinity I was happy to pay to leave Inkscape behind (on mac) for speed and joy. Let's see.
Simple svg stuff and cmyk was the key.
Simple svg stuff and cmyk was the key.
Same here. Designer/Photo V1 are in daily use here.
Skipped V2 entirely so far. IMO that one went very much against what the user base fleeing Adobe wanted and bought into with version 1. It's like they swapped out the decision makers making all the good calls from one release to the next.
if they go subscription they will loose most people to Adobe products
if you gotta pay a subscription your gonna choose the best and what everyone uses as the standard. Adobe.
if you gotta pay a subscription your gonna choose the best and what everyone uses as the standard. Adobe.
I read the article this morning and the first thing I thought was "Welp there goes Pay to Use". The only reason Serif must have caved would be financial pressure. I was hoping they announced a Video Editing Suite in the same level as the restof their affinity tools.
If they go sub or in someway force you to get Canva to get the other tools, I'm going back to Adobe. They said in the tweet they dont have plans to change anything in the foreseeable future, which it translates to "we dont have anything on the table to offer in this space so we will get back to you..." I give them a year before they announce subscriptions.
If they go sub or in someway force you to get Canva to get the other tools, I'm going back to Adobe. They said in the tweet they dont have plans to change anything in the foreseeable future, which it translates to "we dont have anything on the table to offer in this space so we will get back to you..." I give them a year before they announce subscriptions.
Pixelmator Pro is still a one-time purchase.
And Serif has said that there will be no changes to your existing Affinity license. If you have version 1 or version 2 then it will continue working as long as macOS supports it.
Say they charge 5 bucks a month for the whole suite. It’s not just the model, many folks could settle for a cheap, monthly payment.
How much does adobe charge for the tier with illustrator these days? 60$ a month?
The entire value proposition of Affinity apps are that they are one-time purchases and therefore are a better deal for casual users. I don't see Canva doing away with that, at least not entirely. I do foresee several possibilities though:
- The Affinity suite will be offered as a subscription option for existing Canva subscribers or standalone, with a perpetual license purchase as a continued option (similar to Microsoft Office today).
- Affinity under Canva will release new paid upgrade versions more frequently. Whereas Affinity stayed on version 1.x for years with continual new features and improvements, I expect going forward each major numbered version will have a set feature set and then just maintenance/compatibility updates for a period. New features will be reserved for the next paid version. (Side note: Serif was pretty open about the fact that they had to both raise pricing and charge for version 2 of the Affinity suite because their revenue was taking a hit; free upgrades are good for customers but bad for keeping the lights on).
- Canva will (hopefully) add additional product categories to further capture revenue, such as video editing apps or a Lightroom raw photo processing alternative.
At some point they will move on to V3 and, as it was with V2, it will be an entirely new product with its own pricing structure (subscription or not).
At that point they will stop updating and supporting V2, but V2 will carry on working as before until Apple itself will accidentally make it incompatible with a new MacOS version.
Personally I am very happy with the functionality of V2 and I don’t need anything more, so I don’t care much for what is happening.
Sure I would love to have some generative AI functions, but they were never going to happen until a new, paid for, update was released. So nothing much has changed.
It is not written anywhere that Serif would not have moved to a subscription model anyway.
Canva leverages subscription based models while Affinity offered a fantastic one time purchase.
The concern/expectation is that Canva will make the next version of Affinity a subscription, which would be incredibly sad to see. There is already a capable, yet ofttimes despised, subscription based software in this market. Some people hate it in particular because of the subscription model.
For example, one person in this thread subscribed fairly early, only to have Adobe's login servers go down, locking him out of his own content. His login stuff was exposed in some Adobe hack, and then he was charged an extra $100 to unsubscribe. Figure that guy is avoiding in Adobe products like the plague now and forevermore.