Affinity Studio is now free
Yes, Affinity really is free. 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. If you’re on a Canva premium plan, you’ll also be able to unlock Canva’s powerful AI tools within Affinity.
https://www.affinity.studio/Open linkView original on piefed.social199
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AI training?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.......I want free hugs!
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'm not buying that it's free unless it's FOSS almost ever. Maybe it's just a "create an account so we can collect data on you" deal, but that still isn't free.
Yes, you have to create an account in Canva and turn off a bunch of tracking that is set on by default. There's even a record setting that is off at the time of me discovering it, but that just made me nervous.
I recently downloaded it to try it out but i'm thinking of just torrenting adobe tbh.
I was really hoping for Linux support some day. Now, I am totally fine sticking with GIMP.
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.
Yep. It's 100% digital painting. All photo manipulation features are either minimal implementation or simply does not exist.
All the developement roadmap are often times trying to replicate Clip Studio Paint as it becomes the most used digital painting software for newer generation. Like comic/manga layout, integrated 3D pose, etc.
That's what I thought. People keep saying Krita is a great alternative to GIMP, Photoshop, and Affinity Photo, but photo editing is not its focus at all.
That's not exactly true. Yes, the focus shifted to painting a bunch of years ago but Krita still started out as "KImageShop". There are many image editing features available and unlike Gimp, it A) works across all major PC operating systems equally (and Android), B) uses an up to date toolkit and doesn't lag behind by years (Gimp only recently adopted GTK3), C) doesn't user headerbars, and D) isn't named after "a derrogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment".
Krita may have started out as a photo editor, but that's clearly not its focus today. If I need to edit a photo, I will use a tool better suited for that task, even if that tool isn't as pretty as Krita.
Editing features were not removed, so it's still a capable image editor, formal focus or not.
I thought Affinity apps is one of those that works great with Proton/Wine.
It didn't work me at all.
not sure what method you tried, but I was able to get V2 running via Lutris using the guide in this repo
Yes! Thanks, i tried it and it works for me.
Relies on a patched variant of Wine, so hardly "works great with Proton/Wine". I tried V3 with regular Proton and the installer didn't even run.
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.
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.
For now they take the loss to break the Adobe monopoly.
Canva's AI features are a subscription service. Existing Affinty features are now free.
What if not enough people pay for the AI features? Will Affinity enshittify?
Also, are these features going to be littered across the UI as greyed out buttons that show a popover prompting you to get a Canvas subscription when you hover them? That's basically ads baked into the UI.
There's always the option to go back to being a regular paid product.
Not sure why you use future tense because the new version is out now and you can just take a look at it yourself.
It's now an all in one UI and no longer different applications for vector graphics, photo editing, and layout. You can switch between different UIs on the fly and Canva AI is just one of those and one you can even disable:
I don't own a Windows or Mac machine, I have no idea what the current product looks like, but I've been following Affinity for a while in the hopes that I can eventually buy their product with money.
Linux became so good at emulating windows apps, it now runs some of them better than windows itself (higher fps, lower power draw), so eventually their will be a port.
Given that these non native ports run in containers/bottles/whatever and internet access is often limited by default. However internet access is the key for their new business modell.
Basically Linux users will get the same or better product, without the drawbacks, which reminds me of pirated movies, where only the people actually buying it were made to sit through unskipable commercials.
Sadly Affinity Studio isn't one of them - it runs barely, if at all in emulators and believe me we tried. Especially for larger files it's still unusable.
I suspect that both they are using Affinity as a gateway drug For Canva Pro, and are super happy about taking even more customers from Adobe.
Enshittification countdown begins now
It started when they bought affinity.
"Free"
never support anything by canva
Why not?
they're a horrible ai slop company
Ah I see thanks for the heads up
And how does that make a company horrible?
If you can ask that question you're horrible yourself.
I am horrible in many ways, you are right about that :). But I don't think it is fair for a company to be labelled as horrible just because they are adding AI to their services. AI is a technology, and most of what is done currently with this is truly horrible (I am talking about chatgpt, meta, microsoft). But I believe that it can be used for good, and I think Canva implementing AI in Affinity Studio will do good to beginners, amateurs. I say this because I have used Canva many times to create posters, and other things, which would have been pain in bum to do in Gimp. It is just convenient.
You're willingly ignorant about the many negative aspects of using Ai. Being ignorant is fine, but making such a proud display of it is not pretty.
What the hell are you talking about? I just presented my view and you labelled it as being "proud" and me a "ignorant". You first made a personal attack on me and you label me as arrogant!? You are a true example of circle jerk.
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.)
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.
I see someone on masto saying its sending something out to them over internet even when opted out
Just usage pings or actual data?
No full pcap or anakysis so no idea
Some switches were set to on for me under https://www.canva.com/account/privacy-preferences
Lovely. \s They got brought by Canva and went down the Adobe rabbit hole.
I haven't followed this software and company before, what do you mean, what is the catch?
Adobe doesn't offer any of its software for free except acrobat reader, where you get nagged about paid features constantly, but it's easy to ignore.
Why shouldn't I recommend this over cracked Photoshop? Its features seems like closer to PS than Gimp or Krita.
They used to be anti-Adobe and claimed they'd never stoop to their level. This new free version offers Canva Premium plan, which unlocks cloud content. It's only going to get worse from here.
The writing was on the wall when Serif sold the product to Canva. We already knew Canva used a rent seeking model at the corporate level, so it didn’t really matter what promises they made about what they’d do with Affinity.
Less of an Adobe rabbit hole than an Adobe abandoned mineshaft.
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.
This is a good point. I'm going to download all the installers they have today and ferret them away just in case.
Have you managed to find them?
You have to log in to your old Affinity account, and from there you can find the download links.
Thanks I’ll Make sure to try this as I want to keep an apple silicon version of the installation for when I update my mac.
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
Top ten answers on the board; we asked 100 users "How will Canva cover the costs of the software development if Affinity is free?"
It has Ai features by subscription to Canva Premium.
don't believe companies when they tell you they don't want all the money on the planet by any means possible
Enshitification is inevitable. Ugh.
At least give us a Linux version.
So this is basically v3, and they’re trying to gain critical mass adoption vs Adobe.
I’m happy with my v2 for now, but I have a hunch if I migrate to “3” I’ll be modifying my hosts file in the future.
This frustrates me so much.
I paid for v1 and v2 of the suite precisely because I’m willing to pay for a tool that works for me, predictably and reliably and with no compromise in goals. Now I’ll have to switch platforms yet again, because they’re going to monetize somehow, and if it’s not by taking my money, it’ll be by taking something else.
Is Inkscape a reasonable replacement for Illustrator yet? Is there an equivalent for InDesign?
I don’t want to get stuck in a Canvas walled garden, and I’m not going to pay rent to use software.
I hear you. I'm not as doom and gloom as everybody else, but its definitely a shift away from their model. I mean, technically they are keeping their word by keeping Affinity separate and not subscription based like Canva. But I still don't like it nonetheless.
The problem though is that there isn't an alternative. Affinity was the alternative. Inkscape and Gimp have their place, but they are not the same level of software. I guess I'm just going to run my v2 into the ground waiting for other software to step up.
At least V2 still works and won't just disappear. You can still use those apps you bought.
But it's just sad to see this new path. I used to buy all the apps just because I liked the business model. I don't really ever use Publisher, but I bought it anyway.
Now...there's nothing that'll get me to use this "free" shit.
V2 files can be opened in Canva version but they are not backwards compatible.
Still no Linux support. As someone who purchased the Affinity Suite, I'm not sure I like this shift in model. If they keep to just fencing off AI in premium and keep investing in the whole app, fine, but I don't have my hopes up.
Oh no. Affinity was a good paid alternative to the adobe shite, now this is going to turn down a subscription route after they get people hooked, isnt it?
I use this at a center I volunteer at that works with the mentally disabled. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those people are old. Surprisingly, Canva is simple enough that I've been able to train the elderly, of all people, to use the program to make fliers or three-fold pamphlets for themselves. It's a good program for what it does, and the center pays for a premium subscription, so it's not something I personally need to worry much about.
Honestly, I'm fine with this in terms of the program's functionality, as long as Canva does't fuck with its user interface. It is pretty simple and intuitive, and I'd argue that the UI is quite possibly one of its strongest assets, seconded only by the massive amount of options/elements you can add to your project. And it's already apparent what AI is mostly used for within the program: making more graphic elements to slap onto your page, and more ready-made templates you can still go in and alter everything in at-will. And honestly, I'm fine with that.
If they are a registered non profit they shouldn't have to pay for premium, and be eligible for a free subscription
We/they are. So maybe we don't pay then. I've never asked. We just have the premium package, so I assumed we paid.
So when will the ads start to pop up?
It's already functionally an ad for Canva's premium services.
The "ad" is a single button that you can turn off. For now it's fine.
Still no Linux support.
I will stick with FOSS stuff and when needed, Black Flag Adobe in Windows VM.
I was able to get the V2 suite working via Lutris, haven't tried this new version though. Seems to be possible as documented here
Once canva bought affinity it was going to just go downhill eventually.
Oh I think eventually will arrive fairly soon.
If a business charges nothing for a product then it is not the product. You are.
Sometimes that's harmless as in they're wanting you to try their service. Your business for other projects is still the product in that transaction.
Other times it's your personal data that is the product and they're wanting to then turn around and monetize that data.
But in both scenarios, you, or something of yours, is the product.
I have it installed on my laptop. I'm not using their AI web app.
At first glance, this all sounds positive, especially for users without an affinity for AI.
However, time will tell whether the program will become less appealing if it turns out that the majority of Affinity users are not persuaded to sign up for a Canvas subscription for AI editing.
Either certain tools and functions will disappear behind a paywall, or compatibility will be restricted by no longer allowing free import and export to certain file formats.
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.
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.
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.
I sent them feedback back when I heard the news about the Canva merger.
I knew this would happen but it still hurts.
I can only hope I can keep my current version as is without further updates.
I almost bought publisher last week, and postponed till Black Friday. Just wow!!!
I didn't try to do the purchase, but very nice to know the company blocked the purchase! I was also very happy with the product too. What a difference from the likes of Adobe.
Holy shit this is huge… I still have trouble believing it, but holy shit…
Like, a company that actually listens?!??
It seems reasonable for now: you can use all the tools except the AI stuff for free, so it's still (I assume) as full-featured as the last Serif version of Affinity was. And if the AI stuff is not done locally, then that costs them money to run so fair enough that they charge something. But we don't know what Canva plans to do with Affinity. Will the tools be gradually hollowed out while more and more features go behind a paywall? Will they start filling the desktop software with ads? What will they do when they judge that they have poached enough of Adobe's users? Will they brick your software if you close your Canva account? I don't entirely trust them.
I stumbled upon them years ago when I discovered they had online colour tools. However, they've gradually leaned into AI and seem to be racking up a portfolio to rival Adobe.
Affinity has been the best alternative to some of the key Adobe tools for a while now, and it was a one-off payment of about $200 for the whole suite, which was good value. Now it's "free" I'm just a bit worried. Sure, it's not exactly a subscription but where are they going?
I don't know either, and that's the problem. Open source projects can justify being free, even if some of the business models are a bit questionable (e.g. open core). What I do know is companies behind proprietary software has proven time and time again that we're the product.