This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I found this video today from Michael Janda: HOT TAKE - Affinity is NOT "Free".
Although I do not agree with all the points he comes up with, he has some good explanation, while being speculative, why Affinity is going this route. In short: Affinty is now a loss leader, hoping that people will sign up eventually for a Canva subscriptipn for using AI tools in order to compete with Adobe who still is the leader in the professional field.
Not free as in freedom! 🙁
Honestly, this. This is exactly why people don't trust Canva not to enshittify it. OnlyOffice is also owned by a company, but since it's free as in freedom, people know they can trust it.
Affinity is one of the things i lost in moving from windows to Linux, but I've been getting by.
I bought a license before canva acquired it and quite enjoyed the software.
Really sad to see canva doing what everyone knew they would do to it.
If you have to sign up to use it, it isn't free.
AI training?
AI training?
When created a Canva account for Affinity 3, the setting "train AI using information about your general usage which includes fonts, colours, search queries and instructions you input. This does NOT include any of your uploaded images, videos, or designs" was on, "Allow your content to improve AI" was off.
For now it's configurable at https://www.canva.com/account/privacy-preferences and I think they'll have a hard landing on the face if they ever change it.
Probably, and also the first step towards adopting Adobe's shitty business model.
About a year ago, Canva tried to raise their prices significantly.
I forget exactly, but I pay for an account and can have 5 people on my team. They said they would start charging for each team member or something like that.
One person said their cot went up from like $100 to $600, maybe the numbers are off, but it’s close to how severe there increase was.
There was so much backlash over it that they decided to keep the old pricing structure.
So they're planning to hook people in with freebies then boil the frogs a little slower.
So they’re planning to hook people in with freebies then boil the frogs a little slower.
If you never pay a dime anyway, it's kinda irrelevant how much the AI features cost, no?
Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.
Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay.
If they'll at some point revert to the old Affinity business model, there is really not a downside, isn't it? Pay for Affinity and get to use Affinity is what V1 and V2 already did. But the comment by Neon Nova was about the pricing of Canva's AI service and the cost of that is completely irrelevant to "traditional" Affinity users because we're not interested in that feature anyway and – at least right now – they rule out any subscription model for Affinity itself.
They may do this.
Well, that's speculation and reduction of the Affinity feature set is a completely different matter anyway. While I'm not fully on board with the GUI changes – changing canvas size has been moved to a weird sub menu, for example – but in my view I got a major upgrade for free that also reduced the disk footprint from 9GB to 3GB (Mac version, didn't look at the size on Windows before uninstalling V2). So at this very moment it's a useful upgrade for people who used V2 anyway.
I’ve been a paying affinity customer for years, and I’m not signing up for Canva.
I get it’s “free”, but I’m sketched out.
I was really hoping for Linux support some day. Now, I am totally fine sticking with GIMP.
I was really hoping for Linux support some day.
I hope with easy access to Affinity V3, someone in the FOSS world will now reverse engineer the Affinity file format. The only 3rd party solution for Affinity files I'm aware of is Photopea but that may just as well be a version of Affinity Photo running in some VM on the server to convert the files to PSD to then edit the files from there.
Krita is also another good alternative, imo.
Isn't Krita more focused on digital painting than photo editing? I always end up going back to the GIMP because of that even though I use KDE.
Oh god, how are they financing its development? Selling my personal data? Training AI on my data? Nagware? Not giving us a Linux version, ever?
The best possible scenario is that they're just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they've pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they'll alter the deal.
Considering you can turn off telemetry and never need to connect it to the internet after activation, I'm assuming that - like how Adobe uses cheap education licenses to on-ramp people onto their platform - this is largely intended to drive professionals towards Canva and their various other products. They take a loss on this product to become the de-facto standard image/vector/publishing application.
They take a loss on this product to become the de-facto standard image/vector/publishing application.
For now they take the loss to break the Adobe monopoly.
never support anything by canva
never support anything by canva
Getting Affinity without ever paying is hardly supporting them. At least it's a stopgap until Krita finally fixes their text tool which is honestly the sole reason why I bought Affinity 1 and 2. (In case anyone wonders: Yes, I also donated to Krita.)
"Free"
It's weird that I can't just login using my existing Affinity ID, also Canva's privacy policy states clear as day under section 2 that they'll use your data to train AI models, and that policy applies to Affinity.
Edit: Data collection within Affinity seems to be opt-in for now.
Lovely. \s They got brought by Canva and went down the Adobe rabbit hole.
If you’re on a Canva premium plan, you’ll also be able to unlock Canva’s powerful AI tools within Affinity.
So freemium, not free. Which is also fine, just saying.
Edit: Needs new Canva account. My Serif account didn't migrate. Be sure to turn off BS under https://www.canva.com/account/privacy-preferences
I need to make sure I have my old Affinity installers. I'm sure I won't be able to activate in a few years because they decide to take down the authentication server.
