Thank you (long-time Affinity user and fan, and Canva employee here :)
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.
I don't think it disappears - the copy I have will still be on my machine, and free to use as well. Unless they implemented something to remotely delete it?
This is only true for very badly written software, and/or on platforms that maintain very bad backward compatibility. It's not some natural law of software--it's choices that (IMO) bad developers choose to make over and over.
It’s not just the case of badly written software. It will work until they shut off the license servers.
Adobe CS2 is a highly-capable software suite that would happily run on today’s computers. I remember when Adobe shut down the license servers for CS2. They released a version that you didn’t need to activate to assure people that they would still be able to use the software they bought in the future. But then they got tired of hosting the download servers, so they stopped, and that was it.
This already happened with Affinity Photo v1 on iOS; a lot of functionality did not work after an iOS update. It feels like Apple changed something in their libraries, so it doesn't even matter how robust your software is if the underlying OS doesn't honor compatibility.
The Apple ecosystem, in general, is notorious for this: If you update your OS, some 3rd party applications will suddenly no longer work, because Apple keeps introducing breaking changes. But, if you don't update your software, other 3rd party applications will quickly abandon you and block you from using their software until you update. So, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Complicating this is: if your hardware is "too old" (as deemed by Apple), you can't update your software, so eventually you're left in the dust. You can't win.
Unfortunately there's also security people who work day and night to break old software and hardware that cannot keep up with the latest security standards.
your gripe is valid but misdirected. I also own a copy but, the one-time validation requires a validation server. Once that server goes offline, i can no longer install Affinity on a new machine.
I am sorry, but for me the app just died. That may sound dramatic but the promise at acquisition was that nothing would change. The picture that was drawn is that we would get a v3. Sure I would suspect some canva integration, but again, not a whole redo and relaunch that seems at first glance nothing like what we had, and completely taken over into the Canva system.
I’m also a loyal Serif customer, love Affinity, and I work at Canva.
This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
AI features; like generative fill, have COGS and incremental inference costs. Hence that’s an _optional_ subscription.
I understand why you feel that way. Having being involved, the biggest factor to acquisition & joining forces was our shared mission and beliefs; not things like financial engineering.
I hope you can judge us by our actions. It’s you, who we try to build the product for <3
I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.
So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.
Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_
“free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
> We want to prove to be the exception to the rule.
You’ll be the first. It’s an empty promise that can’t / won’t be fulfilled unless it’s a legally binding deal with compensation to users if the deal changes.
I bought v1 + v2 and, by most measures, settled for an inferior product to get a perpetual license. I won’t use the new one for “free” because it’s not. The cost is the very likely scenario of getting rug pulled in the future.
The day the v2 license server shuts down I’ll be asking for a refund.
> I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.
I actually can't but I'd welcome hearing more about the strategy. I suspect what you're alluding to is maybe an open-core model? Generate free value for the entire ecosystem and then capture a portion of it with value-adding paid features? I'd be interested in that but I don't see where the FOSS layer is here.
> I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding
I also want to do mission-driven and moral work in the tech industry but I think there may be a disconnect between how the general population sees the tech industry and how it sees itself. This is my motivation to make these comments; not to be antagonistic and unpleasant for no reason but to attempt to hold up a mirror and show the tech industry the crisis of confidence that it faces. It would be like Philip Morris - after decades of subverting science and pushing cigarettes - launching a vape and expecting to receive the benefit of the doubt that the product has no downsides. Gone are the days of Silicon Valley being the warm and cuddly companies saving the world from their beanbags and open concept offices.
You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.
What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.
> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?
Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.
People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.
> We want to make Affinity, and professional design, the default tool. And a huge part of that is free, forever.
Then please release it without any DRM or mandatory accounts, so that the binary will remain usable even when all the network infrastructure goes down.
This is the main reason for me to prefer old school offline desktop software. Once I've invested time and energy into learning something as complex as a photo editor, I really don't want it taken from me on a whim.
I think it's super cool that you work at Canva and are taking the time to interact with your customer base.
Maybe this isn't the right venue (I didn't see an e-mail address in your profile so I'm just asking here) but can you pass along feedback to the UI team for Affinity?
I personally think most programs, especially audio / video editors are improved by:
A) Optionally having icons that have text labels in-addition to the image (i.e. the word "Cut" + scissors, "Paste" + paintbucket, etc) ; doesn't have to be full on MSFT 'Ribbon' UI either!
B) Giving users the ability to choose how big or small the icons (and associated text) are (i.e. 16-pix, 32-pix, 64-pix or small, medium, large)
For point A:
I am aware this creates a challenge when you make a release of a program for other languages, so it's a burden on the translation and software validation teams.
Use-case: I work between so many different programs when doing photo editing and learning the pictogram icons for each application is mentally burdensome that it's VERY helpful having labels as well. Otherwise I constantly find myself hovering on an icon and reading the tooltip, that text might as well be integrated into the icon!
I end up using CaptureOne for image processing, DxO for noise reduction, Affinity for pixel editing and that's just in dealing with RAW photos for one type of photography, I might use others as well depending on the subject matter.
For point B:
Our monitors now are super high DPI and squinting at tiny icons designed when we had limited real-estate is a real tax on the eyes.
Thank you again for reply on this public forum and many us who are paying customers are happier to give you guys money over companies like Adobe who now only offer subscription software.
Is there any chance of offering a local mode for AI features? It's fine if that's pay-gated, but an increasing number of mass market machines (Macs, mainly, but also workstations with Nvidia cards and AMD boxes like the Framework desktop) have inference capabilities sitting somewhere between competent and excellent and it'd be a shame if all that power just sat unusued. It'd be a nice boost for privacy, too.
If you are allowed to speak on this, I'd like to know, are the reasons Canva is so adamantly refusing to consider a Linux build purely technical (like, a "we have to rebuilt its entire foundations"-kind of refactor)?
> This is not the first step in that. It’s not anywhere close to our plan.
... for the current management. Unless there's some binding contract that prevents this change it's just a matter of enough people in management changing. Enshitification became too common to just believe some company is different.
We are probably devastated because free commercial products have to extract revenue from the user somehow. Maybe not today, but most likely tomorrow. And this will always be a subscription, which was what Affinity was trying to stay away from.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but there is no way some KPI obessed manager isn't going to go... what about locking the Pen tool behind the subscription? What about ads, with an ad-free subscription? And on and on.
Enshittification always sounds like a really good deal in the beginning.
Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.
That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.
I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.
> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible
In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.
I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.
+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.
As a professional book designer and graphic design professor, I am sorry but I can’t rely to switch my main tools (and student guidance) over policy claim from Canva.
I totally get that inference and maintaining software is very costly. If the business model is only oriented toward AI tools, a very good proof of good faith would be to open source and provide a pay-per-use AI API. I have no doubts that a good part of the graphic design community would quickly shift to free as in free speech tools with a foreseeable future. We desperately need a Blender for DTP…
Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.
There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.
And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.
Note that Intel's modern e-Core has 3x decoders per core. When code is straight, they alternate (decoder#1 / decoder#2 / decoder#3). When code is branchy, they split up across different jumps aka if/else statements.
Shrinking the decoder on Bulldozer was clearly the wrong move for Fx-series / AMD. Today's chips are going wide decoder (ex: Apple can do 8x decode per clock tick), deep opcode cache (AMD Zen has a large opcode cache allowing for 6x way lookup per clocktick), or Intel's new and interesting multiple-decoder thing.
People use clever code to tease out microarchitectural details and scour through public information to with these things out. Agner Fog is one example. His microarch analysis documents 3x decoders for the Tremont microarch, predecessor to gracemont (what's currently used for E-cores).
> Leapfrogging fetch and decode clusters have been a distinguishing feature of Intel’s E-Core line ever since Tremont. Skymont doubles down by adding another decode cluster, for a total of three clusters capable of decoding a total of nine instructions per cycle.
Intel tells you this in their optimization manuals and white papers.
They want you to write code that takes advantage of their speedups. Agner Fog is a better writer (a sibling comment already linked to Agner Fogs stuff). But I also like referencing the official manuals and whitepapers as a primary source document.
Hard to beat Intels documents on Intel chips after all.
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
and one day, you're gonna get a knock on your door, and some law enforcement officers will ask you very nicely to install a backdoor or a wiretap onto your tor exit node.
Or perhaps the E-Core team continues their strides and the design side becomes competitive again. AMD used to be uncompetitive after all; tides can change, and I think people are dooming too much. Intel still has a chance.
Part of Intel’s problem is their ‘P Core’ team absolutely sucked for a decade.
Re. on-device AI features: these still have significant training costs; and Canva as a whole has paid hundreds of millions to date in royalties to creatives, including for AI training.
Affinity is free, forever; but not open source; if that makes sense.