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- Hacker News
- I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn’t going to need to use Afinity Studio.by 827a
- Related (which is linked to the actual post on the affinity.studio website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445
- Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext above.by dang
- 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.by rambambram
- GIMP doesn't do 1% of what this does even if you don't have a problem with GIMP's UX. It's not comparable.by Kye
- I've used Photoshop forever, mostly for image manipulation instead of full on graphic production. I've found the web editor Photopea[0] to scratch most of the itch these days.by seemaze
- 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.by _bent
- 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.
by daft_pink - Even worse is inability to use licensed Adobe suite without internet. Beeing in field and edit your work is not possible after a week.by t0bia_s
- I use Pixelmator Pro, which can be bought on the AppStore. If you want to buy directly from the company, there’s Acorn from Flying Meat.
I tried to use Affinity Studio the other day and it wouldn’t allow me to register for “security reasons”. After switching browser and being able to create an account, the login handover from app -> browser -> app is failing.
Instead of user and password they use e-mail plus one-time code. The app opens the browser instead of allowing log-in natively.
I am a paying Sarif customer and I don’t intend to pay for the new version. It’s painfully obvious that I would have no control over the software I buy any more.
by blub - This has always been Melanie Perkin's vision for Canva. She was just SO far ahead of where everyone else was thinking.
She's always been about giving the power to normies for 90% of the work, and AI is making that more accessible than ever.
Because normies, like myself, are using Canva at work, professional designers may be used for the high-end stuff or templates, but then it gets imported into Canva so the normies can do what us normies need to do with it.
by pedalpete - I tried it today after struggling for hours with alternatives, it's much better than anything else I tried.by Zealotux
- 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?
by sixtyj - Adobe likely doesn't have the market cap to acquire Canva, unless I'm missing something in understanding M&A.
Canva is now north of $65B and growing at 100% YoY. Adobe's market cap is $142B, and with every month, Canva is chipping away at Adobe's value.
Can Adobe give up 40% of the company to acquire Canva, and would Canva even want that?
Mel, Cliff, and Cam continue to amaze me!
by pedalpete - > Or attempt to acquire Canva?
I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies...
I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed!
[0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/adobe-and-figm...
by graypegg - 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.
by robenkleene - I don't agree.
What made Figma successful was being able to share via a URL. Period.
No program version problems. No file extension problems. No problems between Mac and Windows. No problems with anti-virus blocking your email attachment. etc.
Figma exists because sharing a bloody file between computers is still a clusterfsck in 2025.
by bsder - I disagree with the comparison to / characterization of “office suite software”. At least the desktop class of office suites have a lot of power features and power users.
It’s not that power users aren’t a market, it’s that casual users are now the larger market and cheaper to serve, and software companies have been catching on to that, to the detriment of power users.
by layer8 - 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.
- It’s free for now. The log in and activation means they can change that any time. I’d rather pay for v3, v4, etc. than being held hostage with a login requirement.
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
The login and activation is a clawback option.
by donmcronald