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otter OP ,
@otter@lemmy.ca avatar

I was recommended Affinity on here a while back as a one-time-payment alternative to Adobe subscription based photoshop/publisher.

I haven't used Canva in a while, but I remember disliking their interface and pricing schemes. Am I right to think that this change is a bad thing for Affinity users?

We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.

hmm :/

Will the ethos of Affinity change now it’s part of a large global company?

The team behind Affinity remains in place and our approach remains the same – and this is something that Canva is very focused for us to maintain too. Yes, we are now a division within a larger company, but we believe this will allow us to serve our community even better in the future and give us even greater freedom and ability to challenge the status quo.

They don't say anything about pricing / plans. If I'm going to be forced into a subscription anyways, then I might as well use adobe's stuff

MasterHound ,

Just bought Designer a week ago. Wouldn't have touched it had it been a subscription. I love it so far but it will be my last purchase of any Affinity software if they move to a subscription.

cosmicrookie ,
@cosmicrookie@lemmy.world avatar

Id contact them if i were you, asking for clarification and possibly a refund.

MasterHound , (edited )

I've sent them an email, not too hopeful I'll get any information out of them about their pricing model going forward though.

Edit: They replied but they just gave a copy and pasted statement from the press release that Designer V2 users will own in perpetuity, nothing regarding future plans.

cosmicrookie , (edited )
@cosmicrookie@lemmy.world avatar

I too wrote to them.
This is their reply

Nothing changes. We will continue to sell the apps as a single payment and you’ll continue to get regular free updates. If anything, this will enable us to introduce bigger updates, faster.

MasterHound ,

That's certainly a more hopeful response. Fingers crossed they keep to their word with V3 too.

conciselyverbose ,

I haven't used Canva in a while, but I remember disliking their interface and pricing schemes. Am I right to think that this change is a bad thing for Affinity users?

I can tell you my first reaction sure as hell wasn't "sweet, now I can hook my photo editor into some online bullshit".

They don't say anything about pricing / plans. If I'm going to be forced into a subscription anyways, then I might as well use adobe's stuff

They have an FAQ that says they're keeping the same model and plan to continue to develop v2. How long that lasts, though?

jaykay ,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

No plans “at this time”. So next week I’m guessing lmao

conciselyverbose ,

Pretty much how I feel. I was OK with the transition to v2 because I thought the upgrade path was reasonable, but I feel like at some point I'm going to get screwed now.

Though without updates the current version should be fine for me for the foreseeable future,

conciselyverbose ,

I wonder if they recognize that "not a subscription" is a huge part of Affinity's market position though.

If you're going to force a subscription, why wouldn't I just use photoshop?

Deeleres ,

Maybe they want to compete with the price per subscription: let's say they want to charge 5 € per month for Photo, Design and Publisher each, against 26 € for Photoshop (alone).

conciselyverbose ,

Maybe.

Wouldn't make a difference to me though. If you go to a subscription, I'm leaving, and with a lot of bad blood.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

The FAQ is very deliberately worded in that nothing changes now, but offers no reassurance for the future. V2 will stay the same, but V3, or whatever they decide to call it at that point, could very well be subscription based.

PopOfAfrica ,

Affinity refused to make Linux ports. That alone killed them for me.

catharso ,

full port would have been great but i would have been already very happy if they at least tried to make it run somewhat ok via wine.

Interstellar_1 ,
@Interstellar_1@pawb.social avatar

Canva had a great UI just a few years ago, but they've simplified it a lot to the point that it's just hard to use now.

jaykay ,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

Nooooo, not Affinity! “Felt right” my ass, everyone has a price don’t they. Well at least I paid for it already, so even if they go subscription I’m fine. Unless they lock me out of it somehow. But then they will just die, as only reason people use it instead of adobe is the pricing

otter OP ,
@otter@lemmy.ca avatar

Yep. There's no reason to continue development for V2 since they need to pivot to Canva integrations, and there's no financial incentive to make anything new for V2 if they make V3 a part of Canva's subscription

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Sounds like a billion dollar deal

aniki ,

Loyalty to anything but yourself is pointless.

DataCrime ,

Looked at Canva’s offerings for about 30 seconds and they all sound like trash.

I really liked Serif, it felt like they intended to do it right and largely did. I probably couldn’t walk away from a billion bucks, so I’ll try to to be too judgmental :-)

furzegulo ,

for me gimp, inkscape and scribus are more than enough

PopOfAfrica , (edited )

For me, a graphic designer, gimp is quite possibly the worst software Ive ever used. I wish someone would fork Krita to have more image editing related features.

Inkscape, however, is fantastic.

furzegulo ,

sure, i wouldn't even dream of doing any real graphics work daily on gimp. i just hope that the developement picks up speed and more contributors after gimp 3.0 releases hopefully in may.

PopOfAfrica ,

Im more interested in Graphite personally https://graphite.rs/

furzegulo ,

that sounds interesting! thanks for sharing!

stellargmite ,

Looks promising. Their website had me thinking I smashed my mobile glass. Nice troll

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Graphite has interesting ideas but I'm no fan of the web first focus.

Plus every time I've tried, their raster editing has absolutely horrible performance.

ShadowCat ,

may I ask what's wrong with gimp ? I've never used it for anything beyond basic editing

PopOfAfrica ,

Namely the horrific UI. Everything is burried within menus and popup windows.

rob_t_firefly ,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

I miss GIMPshop for that reason.

anticurrent ,

The sad thing is making the masses believe that under capitalism, companies strive for competition by making better and distinct products, while in this last century reality most of them are competing for who gets acquired by the bigger corporations and exit with shit loads of money.

oDDmON ,

^This. End stage capitalism at its finest.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

end?

i think the technofeudalism and enshitification of everything can still continue.

oDDmON ,

Oh, def. The fun has just begun.

EncryptKeeper ,

Not the end, the end stage.

Deeleres ,

Remembering the situation when Macromedia was bought bei Adobe – now I have the same vibes again. Five years later nothing was left except Flash – that horrible piece of software – and Dreamweaver – I liked that one. The best transition back then was from Freehand to Illustrator and (consequently from Quark) to InDesign.

And then in 2015 to Affinity. So ... 5 years with Corel, 12 years with Adobe/Macromedia, now 8 years with Affinity, so far ... let's see what they do and what we decide afterwards.

cyberic ,
@cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

My first websites after hand coding were fine in Fireworks :'( I miss Macromedia stuff

stellargmite ,

Yeh. And Adobe were trying to compete with ImageReady. What a cluster that workflow was. Fireworks was great.

elliot_crane ,

Do you want to lose customers forever? This is how you lose customers forever.

This is about the dumbest business decision either side could have made here. The Affinity tools’ only competitive advantage was not having the Adobe pricing model. Canva’s pricing model is basically dogshit Adobe lite.

altima_neo , (edited )
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Well damn that sucks. I actually paid for affinity apps. I hope they don't go the way of subscription, because I may as well don my sailing hat at that point.

becausechemistry ,

Let’s be real, everyone has a number that they’d be willing to sell out for. But this one hurts. Affinity make great software.

Tolstoshev ,

“Family”

ArkyonVeil , (edited )
@ArkyonVeil@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Sigh...
Why...? Why is it too hard? Why is it that in this day and age, we can't simply have something we pay for and keep with no worries. Once I started owning software, Affinity was my choice. They had a long track record of not selling out, retaining high standards and a fairly priced transaction.

You pay for good software, the company works hard to make the software better, and then sells you a better version that you can upgrade at your own choice. Plain, simple and honest.

Nothing lasts in this day and age.

You used to be something Serif, but now you're in the big leagues along with Adobe, and against them you're nothing.

Undramatic PS: Affinity Designer is damn solid, like it more than big A's Illustrator, shame I'm now afraid of pressing the update button >:(

EDIT:

Speculative decision thoughts

Apparently in 2022 when V2 came out, they made triple of what they expected and that number was something like 10-20 million pounds. Even though it sounds like a lot, it might have not been enough.

After blowing off some steam to think clearly, there is the chance that Affinity might've been sinking and hoping for a payday. They have always been a couple steps behind Adobe and . Whenever Adobe makes a new feature they brag about it from the mountains as they got the R&D cash to power those, while Affinity is churning along just polishing their software. This makes it hard to sell at a glance, also FOSS alternatives are getting stronger. So their new user aquisition probably hasn't been great.

They might have been stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they're not free and competing against free software which is just as good if not better. On the other hand while they require payment, Businesses do not mind paying through the nose so long as its "THE BEST" and using alternative NON BEST software introduces unwanted friction.

That 1 billion might've really been the offer they couldn't have refused.

loki ,

I bought Designer last year as a one off. But there's no point in mastering it anymore. That's just going to suck you more into their ecosystem, then a subscription, then raising price, and then whatever they want.

pop ,

Better give inkscape more practice.

lol at the "no plan to change at the moment" crap. that ship has already sailed.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Better give inkscape more practice.

Too bad Inkscape uses GTK. It's fine under Linux and okayish under Windows but under macOS it's just horse shit. There's a reason Krita's popularity exploded. It just works great everywhere (heck, even Android under Samsung DeX).

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

What makes it bad on mac? On windows I find both krita and inkscape mediocre UI's but idk how much of that is the toolkit, and how much just small open source teams not having time for ui/ux

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

What makes it bad on mac?

It's like using an old Java GUI application on a modern OS.

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Yeah, same with GIMP. I would love to use it on my Mac since I already use it and am comfortable with it on Linux, but it's noticeably slow for some reason and you shouldn't even try using it with the touchpad. The windows especially in multi-window mode don't behave as you'd expect, the keybinds don't either, it's very meh all around. I was wondering whether I should get Affinity but I guess with this it's a no.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

The difference to GIMP is that Inkscape is written in C++, so a port to Qt would be more feasible than a Gimp port to Qt.

Krita on Mac works fine, btw. Get it on Steam if you want an auto updater.

PopOfAfrica ,

The only thing that inkscape could be better at is image tracing. Other than that its my favorite vector software.

stellargmite ,

I’ve used Designer for several years now in combination with inkscape very heavily for work having bashed my head against a wall called Adobe Illustrator for years - all the obvious reasons including terrible svg support. Inkscape should be supported for sure , but Designer has sped up workflow no end with what I use it for. It’s a shame that everything must enshittify.

EncryptKeeper ,

“At the moment” being the key part of that phrase. All the changes still have to be worked out lol.

ShadowCat ,

was affinity actually on the same level as adobe ?

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

was affinity actually on the same level as adobe ?

Regarding what? There are no audio and video editors by Serif, for example.

ShadowCat ,

I mean the ones they did have, e.g. was affinity photo as good as photoshop ?

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

was affinity photo as good as photoshop ?

It's not as fully featured. Whether people care for such features is another question. It doesn't support file format plugins (so no AVIF and HEIF support even through plugins) and it doesn't have those AI features.

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