So confusing to read. The author goes extremely deep into details and definitions for every side topic, yet stays vague and euphemistic about the main subject: the app. This is a web article, not something that needs to pass Apple’s review team.
Nice guide. One small practical tip I rarely see mentioned: if the setup forces a Microsoft account, just create a fresh throwaway account during install. In my experience it only asked for a name and password, no phone or extra data. Once Windows finishes installing you can immediately disconnect that account and leave it unused, or delete it later if you prefer. No command-line tricks needed, just a quick burner account and you’re done.
Plus: I also recommend running O&O ShutUp10++ (ShutUpWin11) for quick privacy hardening. It’s portable and includes a good default preset that makes Windows less intrusive. From the same developer, O&O AppBuster lets you remove bundled apps that can’t normally be uninstalled. Both are one-time portable tools, and while Windows updates may re-enable some settings or reinstall apps, it’s still a solid baseline to start from.
Or of course, ditch Windows for Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin or other solid distro, but you can't always do that for friends and family without causing issues for them.
This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif.
Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone else.
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)
I've been using ByteDance's CapCut video editor that has this business model and I've been blown away by the top quality tool you get for free. It really doesn't feel scammy when they ask for money for fancy features that cost them extra GPU cycles to run the AI models.
I think it's simpler than that. Canva's primary competitor is Adobe, and Adobe's remaining advantage is with creative professionals. That's Adobe's core market and their core revenue stream.
It's a classic "commoditize your complements" play. Canva remains profitable without charging for Affinity, but Adobe can't stay profitable if they stop charging for Photoshop/Illustrator.
The business justification works without imputing any more sinister motives than that.
I mean, 9/10ths of the dark-pattern distrustworthy bullshit businesses pull is not required to attain or maintain "profitability," it's just squeezing every dime of revenue from their customers.
I would frankly rather pay for software then be left wondering if I can trust free commercial software.
Would be really nice if we had more of the "just pay" options. As it is the "just pay" options mostly also can't be trusted any more than the free(-mium) options, and both will try their best to "squeeze every dime of revenue".
I think they're giving it away to take mindshare away from Adobe among younger creators. The rise of Capcut and similar mobile first software eventually leads to Adobe, Final Cut for video, and Davinci Resolve. This provides a ladder from Canva to Affinity under one banner at low to no cost.
>No, your content in Affinity is not used to train AI-powered features, or to help AI features learn and improve in other ways, such as model evaluation or quality assurance. In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.
"... 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 ..."
To clarify ... it is not capped. You may scale the lifetime payment option to any size you like in 100 GB increments.
You may also upgrade it later in life, most likely for less money/TB ...
This means that our (the provider) and your (the user) interests are perfectly aligned: we want you to use more storage and we will make it easy for you to do so. Your needs, and usage, will grow and you will make further payments to us over time - just on a longer, more drawn out schedule.
Given that it’s the only thing keeping the US economy afloat right now? Then many of us are loosing our jobs, and no longer having access to drawing tools will matter little.
I think it depends on how it's used or integrated. Image generation and editing seems to be the of the more useful things. "Take outt the power lines from this photo." Etc.
Directory Opus, replacement for File Explorer. It's got a whole bag of tricks but I just appreciate the built in "convert to x" and FTP, oh and the bulk file renaming. Oh and built in support for various archive formats (no more winrar). Oh and (etc etc)
See also Garmin GPS lifetime map data updates, where you update your venerable well functioning gps device, after which it no longer works, sorry no longer supported
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.
> are the apps, previously free, significantly more limited than their prior free versions unless/until you also purchase a subscription for the CanvaAI portions?
I was curious too. The FAQ says this:
> Yes, Affinity really is free. That doesn’t mean you’re getting a watered-down version of the app though. You can use every tool in the Pixel, Vector, and Layout studios, plus all of the customization and export features, as much as you want, with no restrictions or payment needed. The app will also receive free updates with new features and improvements added.
Not sure I see the problem then. Canva has a long enough track record that I don’t suspect they’re going to pull a bait and switch on the freemium and start gate keeping new features any time soon.
I've been using it and so far yeah, a lot of the existing functionality and new functionality is effectively free and it generally only nags you when you use the clearly separate "Canva AI" panel.
Checking the settings also tells me that Segmentation (used in Object Selection) is provided but Depth Estimation (used in Portrait Blur and Select Sampled Depth tools), Colorization (used in Colorize filter, apparently intended to colorize B&W photos) and Super Resolution (used in Super Resolve filter) are all paywalled.
Honestly, I think that's fine. While I'd wish these are all available (and they could be if you looked hard enough for models that can do this) for a flat price (for parts that are not handled server-side), this is still imho mostly fair.
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.
> 1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand
No, there’re not. People with influence or who have invested in the space say that these features are in demand/the next big thing. In reality, I haven’t seen a single user interview where the person actively wanted or was even excited about AI.
Photoshop now has a bunch of features that get used in professional environments. And in the end user space, facial recognition or magic eraser are features in apps like Google Photos that people actively use and like. People probably don't care that it's AI under the hood, in fact they probably don't even realize.
There is a lot of unchecked hype, but that doesn't mean there is no substance.
When people say AI, they refer to LLMs. Your examples are models in general which have been around for a lot longer before the OpenAI and techbros had the AGI wet dream.
I didn't make any assertion about AI, only about "AI" (note the quotes in my GP comment) — i.e. the same old machine-learning-based features like super-resolution upscaling, patch-match, etc, that people have been adding to image-editing software for more than a decade now, but which now get branded as "AI" because people recognize them by this highly-saturated marketing term.
Few artists want generative-AI diffusion models in their paint program; but most artists appreciate "classical" ML-based tools and effects — many of which they might not even think of as being ML-based. Because, until recently, "classical ML" tools and effects have been things run client-side on the system, and so necessarily small and lightweight, only being shipped if they'll work on the lowest-common-denominator GPU (esp. "amount of VRAM") that artists might be using.
The interesting thing is that, due to the genAI craze, GPU training and inference clusters have been highly commoditized / brought into reach for the developers of these "classical ML" models. You don't need to invest in your own hyperscale on-prem GPU cluster to train models bigger than fit on a gaming PC any more. And this has led to increased interest in, and development of, larger "classical ML" models, because now they're not so tightly-bounded by running client-side on lowest-common-denominator hardware. They can instead throw (time on) a cloud GPU cluster to train their model; and then expect the downstream consumer of that model (= a company like Canva) to solve the problem of running the resulting model not by pushing back for something size-optimized to be run locally on user machines, but rather by standing up an model-inference-API backend running it on the same kind of GPU IaaS infra that was used to train it.
Is the same algorithm that allows AI/LLM-enabled apps to remove things from photos? Example: Remove the person who accidentally appeared on the left side of the photo.
My friend, my writing isn't AI slop. It's Adderall slop. AI slop is far more structured.
(Also, because I assume this is your issue: em-dash is option-shift-hyphen on US-English Mac keyboard. I've been using them in my writing for 25 years now, and I won't stop just because LLMs got ahold of them.)
The image generation models have been super useful for anyone wanting to deliver any sort of production content for years. Ofc nobody _promotes_ that. Using ai images is like taking photos as reference for collages. Anyone with a subscription to an image bank is likely happy enough to minibanana some generic references.
I'd buy some of these explinations, except the depth estimation, colorization, and super-resolution ML models they use in the app DO run locally and are still subscription-gated.
Apple has been doing on-device machine learning for portrait blurs and depth estimation for years now, though based on the UI, this might use cloud inference as well.
Granted, these aren't the super heavy ones like generative fill / editing, and I understand that cloud inference isn't cheap. A subscription for cloud-based ML features is something I'd find acceptable, and today that's what has launched... The real question is what they plan to do with this in 2-5 years. Will more non-"AI" features make their way into the pro tier? Only time will tell!
> 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.
Just release some simple free "test application" that checks whether the computer satisfies the system requirements and does something "simple" (but relevant for the user) so that the users want to try out this simple free test application and want to update their hardware so that it can run.
Now, after the users have been incentivized to update their hardware so that they can run the cool test application, you can upsell your users to the "full software experience". :-)
That being said, my line of argument here would be a bit more compelling if Canva were still charging for the app.
The fact that the apps are now free, suggests that they expect the subscriptions to pay not just for the backend-cluster OpEx, but also for all the developers’ salaries and so forth.
---
Honestly, I think Canva here are copying Adobe's playbook, but with a more honest approach than Adobe ever had; one reflecting a much more aware/cynical take on how the software market works in 2025.
Adobe essentially charges a continuing fee just to continue to run the software they coded and shipped to you, on your own computer — regardless of whether you even care about any further software updates. (Sure, the subscription pays for other things, like Adobe Bridge cloud storage and so forth, but if you don't pay the subscription, you don't even get to just run the apps.)
But this also means that people quite often crack Adobe's apps — because there's something there of value to run on your own computer, if you just strip off the DRM.
Canva here are taking a much more pragmatic approach:
• Anything that is given to the user to run is free, because ultimately, if you charged for it, people would just crack it. They aren't bothering with DRM or even trying to treat the app itself as a revenue stream. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Especially if you're not in a market position where you think you can win the big enterprise customers over from Adobe.
• Anything that is run on your backend is charged for. Because users can't force your cloud services to do anything without a subscription. There's no "cracking" a cloud service.
• But also, crucially — if a feature is a "fake cloud" feature, where it could be "pulled down from the cloud" back into the client by writing a compatible implementation of the server backend that does some simple thing, and patching the software to speak to that server (either over the Internet, or to a local-on-the-machine background service that ships with the patch) — then users will do that. So you can only really charge for features that can't be "pulled down" in this way. Like, for example, features relying on some kind of secret-sauce ML model that you never expose to the client.
(And that last bit actually makes me less wary of their approach here: it suggests that they likely won't be charging for anything other than inherently "cloudy" features: these large-ML-model-driven features, cloud storage/collaboration features, etc. Which might mean that non-"cloudy" features get ignored... but likely not. For the same reason that Apple doesn't ignore macOS/iOS features in favor of iCloud features: new users won't be interested switching to the platform [and then potentially subscribing] if the base platform itself isn't competitive / doesn't serve their needs.)
Pricing in most businesses has little relation to the cost of developing and making the product. Most businesses price relative to the value that their product delivers to the customer. If there is robust competition, then the price is often driven down towards the cost, but it's not driven by the cost. In Adobe's case, they see that there is an entire industry of creative people using their products as their primary tool(s). Those employees are often paid well, with salaries from 50k-100k per year as common. Is it not reasonable (from Adobe's perspective) that employers pay 1/50th of the employee's salary for their primary and most useful tool? No one complains when the plumber requires a work truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools.
The price ceiling has little relation to cost, sure. But COGS sets an effective price floor — you'll be revenue-negative unless you do the math to ensure you're charging customers (especially your largest customers) at least COGS. COGS is the most critical number your enterprise salespeople will ask you for in order to backstop their negotiations.
For some companies, COGS and customer LTV are numbers with such different orders of magnitude that they don't even have to think about the COGS side.
But "software you charge a one-time fee for" generally produces a very low customer LTV; and "renting compute on someone else's GPU IaaS" generally produces a very high (customer-lifetime-integrated) COGS; so if they were sticking to the "just charge for the software" model, "COGS rising faster than CLTV" would be a direct threat to their business model. Which is... why they don't want to do that.
It's been a long time since I looked into it, but is pirating Adobe's products viable these days? I thought it was pretty much impossible, and the last piratable release is quite old.
It simply depends on what your needs are IMO - You can do great magazine design in Affinity, brochures, flyers, logos all that stuff. The only thing I'd miss in InDesign is image expand probably.
Also if you're making video games, and you don't need to export multi-res textures and work on the edge of file formats for advanced texturing etc, if your budget and needs are served by Affinity why spend on Adobe?
You have reduced it down to the wrong components.
Its not about the price, its about care and effort in development.
If something free gets put behind a paywall because theres genuinely a push for growth in the software thats fair enough. Taking 3 seperately paid products and turning them into 1 freemium app which requires registering an account for is completely different IMO.
I worked at Serif during the early years of their pivot from boxed desktop software in C++ for Windows to an internet company making modern design software. It was a nice place to work, had some good friends there. Been interesting watching their journey.
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?
I am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version.
This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades.
I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.
I suspect Canva is willing to offer Affinity for free because it holds Adobe's feet to the fire and forces them to compete on Canva's home turf: the nonprofessional design market.
There's clearly a funnel for Canva Pro upgrades, but (to my knowledge) they've never paywalled formerly-free features, and it seems to be a profitable strategy so far.
OTOH some sources report Canva paid like $400M for Affinity. Even for a company like Canva it does seem significant. They might need to adapt their strategy if the investment doesn't pan out as expected.
Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.
Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.
Offering it for free is likely to increase their user base significantly, which in turn will increase the number of people who end up paying for the AI features.
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.
Freemium definition: A type of business model that offers basic features of a product or service to users at no cost and charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features.
Yes, you can add on additional AI if you want it. But, the product is not at all limited in features. It is a complete product, 100% of what we were paying for before, now for free, plus new features, also free.
I would define it more like a lost-leader than freemium.
Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top.
If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
It is a freemium model, but they are doing it in the proper way. I’m a bit worried this could lead to enshittification down the road, but for now I’m glad they’re doing this, will definitely give it another try, and might throw in a few bucks even. (Especially if they reconstider their stance on Linux support!)
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.
Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
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.
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 used Quark XPress, and it really felt like it had a monopoly on the professional market in the UK at the time. It didn't really innovate, it was slow and clunky. Then InDesign came along and it was a breath of fresh air.
Took many years for the transition to happen, but a lot of people in my circle wanted to see the back of Quark.
When I worked in desktop publishing (35 years ago, sigh) we used Ready, Set, Go extensively. Certainly seemed like a more intuitive UI than what little I've seen of Quark, at least.
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.
But is the new Affinity app quite literally feature equivalent? Is there anything the latest version of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo Desktop edition can do that the new combined Affinity app cannot do? That's my only concern.
It's functionally identical to the software registration requirement of previous Affinity software releases, except that instead of verifying a registration number, it's now verifying a (currently) free Canva account credential.
I realize that money rules everything but I find it so confusing that so many companies will spend a decade building a great product and then just exit with full knowledge that it will be the inevitable end of the relevance of their work.
You might think that some founders somewhere out there would be motivated by some level of ego to say “no, I won’t sell out, I built this amazing thing and the highest bidder owner will milk it dry.”
But no, in technology the cult of the exit rules all. The end goal isn’t to build something great that last, putting food on the table for the long term. the end goal is to sell to the highest possible bid capitalist leech and move on to the next one.
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 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…
You can have controlling stake in a company without working there day to day.
Apple literally destroyed those companies. After Apple acquired NeXT there was one less operating system on the market. PA Semi now doesn’t have a product that is sold to the open market.
Hate to break it to you, but NeXTSTEP failed in the marketplace. If Apple hadn't bought them, they'd still be gone.
But more importantly: who cares? There is no moral imperative to keep products alive. It's just stuff that people make. Products come and go, and founders owe you nothing.
Who cares right? Maybe Apple and Google and Microsoft should just merge. Then we can just use the same operating system for everything.
Can’t think of any downside!
I’m not mourning the loss of a product, I’m lamenting the negative externalities of acquisitions. Some of them are a net positive for sure but it seems like those are in the minority.
I don't understand your argument... there are quite a few operating systems receiving active development. For that matter, just with the Linux kernel there are dozens of operating system distributions, several based on BSD and more still when you consider ongoing support for Solaris forks and more bespoke OSes (redux, etc) and clones (ReactOS, Haiku, etc).
If YOU want another OS, there's nobody stopping you from developing, forking or otherwise funding the creation or developing one.
MacOS v10+ accounts for NeXTSTEP, but what do you consider to be the current MacOS (classic) to satisfy the not having one less operating system condition?
Oh noes... you mean there's no more Netware, Lantastic or (insert dozens of others), theres only (insert hundreds of linux derivatives), (insert a handful of BSD variants), (insert solaris variants), (insert clones), and a half dozen relatively popular new OSes all under current development, not counting the three popular mainstream commercial providers?
Tell us more about this "you mean there's no more Netware, Lantastic or (insert dozens of others), theres only (insert hundreds of linux derivatives), (insert a handful of BSD variants), (insert solaris variants), (insert clones), and a half dozen relatively popular new OSes all under current development, not counting the three popular mainstream commercial providers" MacOS classic successor.
Does the project have a website? What kind of systems does it run on? How do we acquire it?
'you mean there's no more Netware, Lantastic or (insert dozens of others), theres only (insert hundreds of linux derivatives), (insert a handful of BSD variants), (insert solaris variants), (insert clones), and a half dozen relatively popular new OSes all under current development, not counting the three popular mainstream commercial providers' is strangely absent from your list.
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 ...).
It may or may not work out. Once you are not actively involved, its not per your vision anymore anyway. And at the end of the day, if you don't think e.g. in this case its very hard compete with Adobe and I really don't want to risk my payday, you'll sell it and move on to do whatever next you want to do.
If we want something to last, I think open-source is the solution.
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.
Maybe not inevitable but “most likely outcome by far.”
It’s not like your median founder hasn’t heard of enshittification. They just don’t care. They’re by and large out for a quick buck, not much different than a day trader or a gambler. And the VC system enables that rather than being focused on building companies that are generational and customer focused.
Switching to the freemium resource extraction model makes it utterly unattractive. (If I wanted to go with the whole "nice app you got, shame if something happened to it" model, Adobe's got that covered)
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.
That’s a good way of putting it. Previously Serif’s goals were aligned with my wishes. They’d release a new version of the software ever so often and I’d pay to upgrade. Fair.
Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.
Once they manage to get enough Adobe customers on there and get some good market share, the investors will want their money multiplied (and you can't realistically do that just with AI features), so they will use the same playbook like any other business out there that used VC money to take over a market, and make you pay, probably first for proper support, and then more and more updates will come only to the + subscriptions.
The alternative is that they monetize it the same way Canva monetizes its other products: most features free, "pro" subscription for online collaboration/server-driven stuff and a library of stock content. Plus an enterprise tier.
All of that could get added to affinity without changing its core offering, which would be consistent with both their past strategy and their current messaging.
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.
It sounds like you're positioning this as a counter to the post you're replying to, but I think that is actually what they're complaining about.
> you only pay if you want Canva AI features
Right, so what they've done is tied their business model as a product to AI features and nothing else. That's not "oh good, I can use it for free", it's "oh no, they are no longer incentivised to care about the parts of the product I wanted".
the ai bubble has already popped!!! the biggest tech companies on the planet who are spending insane amounts of capex on “ai” keep reporting insane earnings reports one after another, things are popping left & right
this question could be reasonably asked of any company's capex expenditure, no? reasonably I will trust until proven otherwise that companies as successful as our biggest ones know what they are doing vs. 76.89% of HN claiming some sort of fictitious "bubble"
it is same thing we keep hearing for about a decade now how "recession is imminent" which of course it'll eventually happen, it always does, you just have to predict it for 10-15 years and one day you'll be right... same thing with this "bubble" - there will eventually be a "pull back" - prolonged capex of this magnitude is not something any company will do but it is getting so boring here on HN hearing about this amazing 'bubble' that is about to pop and we just keep sitting and waiting for this magical moment while the companies, in a very, very, very bad economy are crushing earnings...
I have to admit but unifying all apps and let me choose which panels to see it a good improvement over the old apps. Plus the fact that now I can share the editable files with others that don't use affinity and they can just download the app for free. I agree, in the future it might turn into another adobe but for now its nice.
It's definitely a sad end, though I still think that what happened with Xara was the real tragedy. (A friend of mine is still bitter about Freehand too).
Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
> Someone should investigate why the 2D vector graphics space is such a repeated dumpster fire.
It’s interesting that none of the independent tools survive for long. I wonder if Adobe Illustrator is so dominant that there is little room left for the competitors.
I believe there is room left, particularly as some users would still be preferring to use Freehand after all this time, but Figma is strong in this space now.
Can you share a good resource on how to set up Radarr with Jellyfin? I tried but couldn’t get it to work. I just want to have it running on my PC (not a dedicated server), my computer is connected to my TV via HDMI and that’s all I need.
Right now, for pirated content, I use the Stremio app for Windows [1] with the Torrentio [2] and PirateBay+ [3] addons. It’s a “sandboxed,” relatively safe way to pirate. Stremio itself is a legal piece of software (for now), and I feel safe using those illegal addons without worrying that they might inject malware into my PC. It works well for most movies, but not always for older or more obscure ones. There’s also a UX issue: you have to choose between different pirated versions of the same movie and test several to find one that works properly.
Also, I don’t need a VPN because in my country ISPs don’t really care about that (yet), so a lot of people just pirate content, it would be a nightmare otherwise.
dunno man, if you're struggling that much probably just download movies of the pirate bay and use vlc to play them. radarr isn't that massive of an upgrade
i use it but i have a server if i had to run it locally i'd probably just skip it
I watch a lot of YouTube, and I also recommend the extension UnTrap for YouTube (Firefox [1], Chrome [2], more [3]).
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
I really appreciate the work behind Immich and how solid the product already is.
Personally, I don’t want cloud sync/storage, but I understand it’s a need for many users. What I hope is that a fully local mode can be considered in the future. For me, the goal is simply to have a great photo management app. Google Photos, for example, limits functionality if you don’t use their cloud and pushes you toward paid storage. That’s where Immich has a opportunity to shine.
Immich isn't "cloud storage", at least in the sense that the server runs on your own system. We hope to have more improvements in the future to allow it to replace the local gallery app on a device, but it'll always need the server for the full functionality.
This feels like a departure from Google’s usual approach. On desktop, Google has historically pushed everything into the browser, especially Chrome where they enjoy massive market share. Aside from some experiments in the 2000s like Google Desktop, they have not really released native Windows apps in the past decade.
Mobile is different, Google has plenty of native apps on Android and iOS. But on desktop almost everything has been browser based such as YouTube, Gmail or Docs. Personally, I would love to see something like a native YouTube Music app similar to Spotify instead of being locked into a browser tab.
I think part of this shift comes from the pressure of modern native apps like ChatGPT’s desktop client. With a quick shortcut like Alt+Space you instantly open a search/chat box, that kind of OS level integration is not possible with a browser or even with PWAs.
So while this might look like a small product announcement, I see it as a bit of a paradigm change for Google.
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