The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1]
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
Canva slowly built out enterprise features, but it’s not fully there yet. They seem to be aiming for what Sketch was aiming for before Figma overtook it - the ability for teams to publish and use design systems and templates in Canva. Which is a cool niche to start with, but isn’t flexible enough.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
Canva and Affinity just released another news [1] which makes the pledge that
> We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it.
Primarily? Yes. But there are even companies that rather lose money than compromise on some product or other principles. Mind you, those are privately owned. Boards and shareholders fuck everything they touch.
“Compete with Adobe” presumably means they will enshitten Affinity software even worse than Adobe did theirs. Looking forward to subscription-based ad-infested nagware.
This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else.
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
It's not support at all in this case, don't mix everything. Someone says something wrong about a product you're literally working on, there's nothing wrong in responding.
I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
"Flatten" comes from the world of desktop image editors. You "flatten" one layer down to the next to make one layer. Sometimes the people who work on these kinds of things forget their users might have never used software with metaphors like this.
He does explain the rationale though. They’re both things I didn’t know about canva generated files. Makes sense for them to do that I guess, it means you won’t be able to reuse any of their stuff outside of their platform.
It's good advice sure. But downgrading their work, no. Unless you have explicit requirements that aren't met like your text being selectable, downgrading work because you have a prejudice against an authoring tool isn't cool. What if another educator has an issue with Power Point, and another with Sheets. Should students have to match their authoring tool with their educators for each lesson?
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
What you're saying makes sense... if the OP explicitly tells the students to make their work available in a shareable and copyable format. The vast majority of presentations in schools don't live beyond the moment the presentation is finished.
I see now that I should have made myself more clear. slides made in InDesign are indeed a stated requirment. Why....
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
Tapping into both my own uni graphics design and a past life as senior exec at a mega corp: because designers that use bad tools to make unusable presentations are failing "you had one job", to make something presentable across the variety of business modalities.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.
And if you're coming from the Affinity side, don't worry your new corporate overlords DO care about people, and employees are their #1 priority </empty_talk>
same reason you'd downgrade a programming student if they handed in an assignment as an Excel macro? Not just because of the VBA but because to use it you now need to buy MS Office?
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news.
Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
If the course makes it clear that grading is affected by accessibility and efficiency of file size, and then submitted work ignores those factors - regardless of Canva being used - then downgrading it is justified. Perhaps it’s obvious to designers that Canva has these problems, but to a non-designer like myself, the comment sounds like snobbery, with students’ grades affected by the capricious whims of their teacher.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
> Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all.
I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.
It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).
- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
- Blender -- 3D modeling
- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)
Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases.
GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).
I used most of those (I paid my way through college with Photoshop 2.0 and Macromedia stuff). There is really nothing in the Open Source world that is good enough. Maybe Krita, but not for Illustrator-grade vector editing. I really miss Macromedia...
> It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense
I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)
I already started to worry about Affinity's strategy when they introduced online activation in version 2 of their software. I really appreciated the offline activation in the original versions - it means I will forever own Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher 1 on my NAS, no matter what they decide to do in the future.
Affinity already disappointed the original believers when they started off telling people they could pay a one-time fee and get all future updates for free. They then ditched version 1.xx buyers by releasing a version 2 that you could only use if you paid them again.
Affinity should not have said that (if they did), and no one should have believed them. That's just not how software or business works. Even if we go back in time to packaged software, big updates were always a pay for upgrade.
I've been using Affinity products forever, in fact since before the Affinity era, then they were branded Serif (DrawPlus, PhotoPlus, etc)... They have been incredibly consistent over the years with the quality of their products, which is why I have purchased many licenses over the years and always recommended people to look into their software... Like others in the thread, I really do hope they don't change to subscription-based pricing, but I assume the worst.
Even worse many apps now push "Monthly payments (payed yearly)", like some scammy car salesman.
You can try for 7 days, then don't worry we'll charge for 12 months.
Ridiculous for solo devs, full stack, creatives with lots of apps etc.
I use several apps a bit here and there throughout the year but that's seemingly not a usecase for these companies, you're either "in" 365 or won't be able to use the app.
Increasingly I'm looking at hoarding "feature-complete" applications that work fine totally offline and don't need updates. Things like text editors, GIMP, Inkscape, Foobar2000, IrfanView, file manager apps.
Have to extract the most value for shareholders. Only way i see it changing is people start stealing software because they get sick of it or people stop using subscription based licenses all together.
I absolutely hate it too. I think we all need a subscriptions manager.
Adobe for example were charging me $15 per month for Lightroom forever and Lightroom had broken and deleted all my photos years before. I think there was a problem with their software because I did not have a subscription that I could see when I logged in to any of the accounts I had.
I just gave up at some point trying to cancel (I'd even talked with their chat for several hours). But recently logged in and managed to finally see the hidden subscription! It was still difficult to cancel but at least I could actually do it!
Hard to know what to do apart from take Adobe to the small claims court about this.
Pure speculation on my part but I think the way it will go down is Canva will announce that you can get access to Affinity products via a Canva subscription, with an option to buy the individual products outright like today. They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".
Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!
Am I the only only reading "no changes ... at this time" with a ", but there are going to be ..."
This is a different context. Whenever an acquired business says "at this time", it means "forget everything you think you knew about us, so long suckers!".
I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?
Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day.
Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.
Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.
> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).*
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.
I switched to Capture One years ago, but recently switched back to Lightroom. It’s much much faster now and they also recently launched advanced color editing, AI masks, and true HDR support which pushed me over the edge.
I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.
Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.
It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.
A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support/<Program Name>/.
I enjoy Serif products but have always wondered how it would survive. Pixelmator stayed a family-run bootstrapped operation while Serif scaled a company in the EU around the Affinity Suite.
I have Affinity Designer and Publisher, which I've used to design and publish a music fanzine: https://www.glidermag.com
This is slightly worrying news as Canva is the opposite of the Affinity suite: cloud-only and subscription-based. I could purchase brush sets on Affinity for a fixed price, and many were made available on the user messageboard for free.
Off topic, and if I may be so bold, check out Whitelands. They’re my friends band and they just toured with Slowdive, one to watch out for! (I am 100% biased though).
There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration.
Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again. If you bought the old version you can continue to use it, but it's no longer officially supported nor will it receive any future updates.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
> I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
Do they? It's not super common, but I can think of the JetBrains IDEs that I believe let you continue to use the last version of the IDE before you stopped paying. Alfred, the Spotlight alternative for Mac does something like that, and you get a discount code if you own the last version.
Inkscape is quite good actually. But GIMP is lightyears away from ever being in the same league. We need an open source Photoshop and Publisher program.
I have a few subscriptions and most are annually paid. I consider that as a one time payment with updates free for the year. But what I don’t like is when the price don’t match the value, my data taken hostage, and updates that break my workflow (and “AI” features activated without my knowing). I got rid of anything like this in my personal computing space.
I appreciate that, but it doesn’t deal with the reality that subscriptions are several times more expensive than buying up-front.
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
I like Affinity products. They replaced all my photoshop/illustrator needs for webdev and it was so easy to switch. The fixed license cost was great too. Now I'm worried that the typical scenario is going to unfold where Canva makes sweeping changes, replaces product vision and licensing model.
I guess I can keep using the current versions for a while, until they stop the updates.
Yeah, I love their Designer and Publisher products. Haven’t used Photo really because I already used Pixelmator Pro but it also looks good, and between those and Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve i’ve cut Adobe out of my life.
So this is a super worrying announcement. I really hope they don’t screw up Affinity - I really wonder how long they can hold off the temptation to let them do what they do without screwing it all up and killing the product line…
It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.
Because not everyone can or should IPO. Once you get to a certain point in size, your investors will start pushing for an exit (where you have two main options, IPO or sell).
What investors? As far as I know they were never VC funded. Affinity wasn’t a dinky startup, the parent company (Serif) was founded almost four decades ago.
It's sad that management buyouts aren't more popular. It would probably make for more quality products not having to conform to expectations of the market or private equity.
Apparently most of the market doesn’t want the same things you want.
Otherwise Affinity would be the giant acquiring a much smaller Canva team.
That said, this is also further proof of why the standalone software license model died. If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
Turns out if you want a software team to continue providing value to you, you should probably put them on salary (subscription).
> If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ:
> 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.
Riiight. They had a fantastically enjoyable and profitable business going for themselves...but they decided they'd rather give up all control and sell their baby to a much larger corporate entity, give up the future upside from any growth, and play office politics instead of control their own destiny.
Not really. They did so because people pay MUCH more for much less functionality in Canva, and so accepting the offer gives them a payday they couldn't hope to accumulate themselves.
Profit in software companies does in fact provide most of those example.
Only the last one needs some clarification. If a business did not do things that benefit others, they wouldn't get paid. So, almost by definition, businesses do. You might argue that a bigger value could be provided in another way, but it definitely does provide value.
We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money. Affinity offers a good product for a reasonable price. Adobe offers a better product but the subscription model is hated by many. For me Affinity products are good enough. Let's hope the current versions keep on working on Apple Silicon and Windows 11/12/etc. The current 2 version is good enough for me and for the next ten years. If I really need AI tools for image editing, I'll take a one month subscription to some tool.
> We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money
Such a strange statement in 2024, we all know almost no developers can afford to live off charging a fair price $20+ for software on there because people wont buy it, or charging the price people will actually pay on there which is $0.
Only way to make money on the App Store is to hammer in ads, sell data, exploit or trick people into subscriptions.
I look at app stores and see a lot of "free to play" products. So many users have gotten so accustomed to not paying upfront for products (which historically could be substantial amounts) that the option is often no longer available.
Affinity targets professional users who would purchase Adobe products otherwise. Professional users are more willing to pay for products. Affinity was doing pretty well in the Mac App Store (though they moved to free download + in-app purchase or purchase through their website).
Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.
And yet, they released a new version and I and every Affinity user I know bought it. Don't forget that a lot of people moved from Adobe to Affinity apps because Adobe rammed subscriptions down their throats. There is a lot of loyalty towards Affinity because they are not Adobe, if they become a mini-Adobe, that loyalty will be burned to the ground. And at that point, why not just use Adobe products? They'll lose playing Adobe's game, Adobe has infinite funds in comparison and can pull an Office 365 on Canva.
I think one thing most people are missing: because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
Think about it: why would Canva essentially destroy the reason why so many users (around 3 million according to the reporting) went to Affinity in the first place by going to a subscription model? I don't see that happening.
Canva is clear they want a foothold in the professional design market and buying Affinity and its team is the quickest way to get there.
I paid for V1 of the Affinity suite and happily paid for the universal V2 license upgrade which enabled me to run their apps on my iPad and my Mac and even Windows if I ever needed that. It was a bargain.
Ironically, I just removed the last remnants of Creative Cloud last week. I hadn't been using it, but it was there "just in case…".
Unlike when Adobe tried to buy Figma, I'm more optimistic than most that this going to turn out well for existing Affinity users.
I'd have no problem with being able to roundtrip designs between Affinity and Canva seamlessly. Someone could start on Canva and one a project progressed to a certain point, they could seamlessly transition to Affinity. Depending on what you're doing, you can quickly reach Canva's limits and it should be trivial to pickup where you left on in a future version of Affinity Designer or Photo.
Other than being able to configure DropBox, there's no cloud syncing support built-in to Affinity. Sure, you can glue it together with iCloud, OneBox, etc. but that's not what users should have to do in 2024.
I'm no stranger to bad outcomes from botched and user-hostile mergers and acquisitions of software. But this one has all of the potential to go the right way and I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.
> because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
please bookmark your own post and come back to it in five years so you can have a big a laugh.
Canva wants to be a player in image editing/design/etc. They have a big product that their investors love and has the ever-so-common monthly-tax funding model.
They have now bought a tiny, niche, desktop editing suite that makes approximately zero profit compared to Canva.
Do you think they did this because:
1. they thought it would be fun to own it and not interfere in any way, and to tell their investors to fuck off over and over when they suggest redeploying resources
1. they thought it would provide a good group of people and codebases to expand their existing editing software, and given that the software they currently sell makes essentially no money, at best they'll let it limp along with most staff working on integrating it into Canva-proper, at worst they'll kill it
(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher)
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
As a happy Affinity customer and relatively casual user I prefer them because of their reasonable fixed prices and because and I don't have to run the abomination that is the Adobe Cloud client on my machine.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
It's clearly enough for many people. That's the only reason I use Affinity, although I do agree Adobe could change their pricing models overnight and they would be in trouble.
"[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash
So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow.
But I wouldn't get my hopes up. "There are no changes to our current pricing model planned _at this time_" is already a very telling part of Serif's previous statement.
While they have earned a measure of trust, the problem is that they aren't the ones you need to trust anymore - if Canva wants to turn Affinity into a collection of bloodsucking subscription apps, then that's what's going to happen, short of a legally binding guarantee to the contrary.
The best redeeming feature of Affinity apps was that they weren't a bloodsucking subscription like Adobe. Hopefully they have a plan for the apps that keeps them the best anti-Adobe option.
they can't guarantee they won't move to a subscription service in the future - this entire discussion is about how Affinity management have sold out and no longer control the company.
Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
I was a professional photographer until late last year.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
Absolutely agreed. And your observation is the same I’ve seen with many of my artist friends. Everyone went from “fuck this Firefly shit” to “I need all of this yesterday.”
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
> Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version of Flex)... to cut a long story short - gave me shall we say - a few resentments towards the company. I suppose it's time to consider Pixelmator now, I'm such a grey-beard... subscriptions suck. ;-)
Pixelmator is nice for tinkering, but in no way it compares to Adobe Ps/Ilustrator for professional use. Workflow you can learn but there are subtle bugs that just crop up here and there like freeform transform handles just disappearing on some backgrounds etc. Some of the design decisions are different enough so that I haven't still gotten used to them after two years because it just doesn't feel intuitive to me, e.g. every single time I mess up working with text tool for the first five minutes time until I recall how it works.
This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/
I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.
The problem with V2 license is that it cannot be activated offline so Canva can take a courageous decision to stop activations any time in future. V1 is great because it can be activated offline.
Interesting! I didn't realise this, however on balance I think I'm still happy with my purchase. Also looking into it, business licences (minimum of 2 pack purchase) can still be activated offline, just in case that is useful to anyone https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/188396-off...
Great to know, I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
> I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
you're...declining to support a company you like that makes software you like, that is offering a massive discount to you, because at some point in the future they may not allow more activations of version 2, which would not affect your ability to use version 1 in any way?
this is a rather idiosyncratic position to take.
> The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
as an affinity user, I am glad they didn't do that and instead did almost literally anything else with that engineering time.
Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
This would be a great time for Canva to reassure customers that they don’t intend to change Affinity‘s business model. Not to say such assurances are even a reliable indicator of future plans, but it would at least be a nice gesture.
That would be pointless as they will 100% be changing the business model. We’ve learned that over the past 20 years. RIP Affinity and one-time purchases.
Same. I upgraded last year and the software is fantastic and priced exceptionally well. I used to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it got way too expensive and the frequency I used it didn't justify the price. Glad I found Affinity. I have Designer V2, Photo V2, and Publisher V2. I use all of them occasionally when I have time to work on my side projects. Subscriptions suck.
I’m increasingly tempted to buy a second hand license for one of the old single-purchase Creative Suites and just run that in a VM or with period-accurate hardware forever. For me practically all of the value in current graphic editors is compatibility with modern operating systems… CS1-CS3 are basically feature complete as far as I’m concerned.
Honestly there's still things from CS3 that are missing in Designer V2! Being able to auto-trace sketches is still something that Designer can't do. There isn't really much that I'm doing now in a vector editor, that I wasn't doing 15 years ago. "feature complete" is a good way to put it.
I wonder if it will work that long without need for patches/updates with the current pace of deprecations in macOS. Using Affinity Photo myself, wondering if I’d better off switching to Windows at this point.
To be honest, that’s only one of the many reason to leave the Apple ecosystem in the near future.
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
I got a press release email from Canva today that included the following about perpetual licenses, which reads to me as if the prices are going to be increasing on those licenses:
> We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
> We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
> If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
I guess there goes Affinity's only reason one might prefer them over Adobe. Personally, I use all their programs quite a bit (Photo, Designer, Publisher). I like them, but I don't think they're better than Adobe's offering. If they'll eventually shift to a subscription model, I guess I won't be interested in Affinity anymore, given their products are inferior.
Not sure why a web based subscription product which already had collaboration features would want to own native one shot apps.
Only way I can see logic for this acquisition is if they're wanting the talent/experience of Affinity's developers to build web based offerings of the feature sets of Photo, Designers, Publisher as part of a Canva web offering.
The latter is unlikely. The developers are active on the Affinity messageboards, I don't recall them ever having any interest in building web apps. Just creating a "good enough" cross-platform alternative to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator is more than a full-time job already.
They don’t need to do that. First, Adobe doesn’t see Affinity as meaningful competition. Adobe sees Figma and Canva (and Blackmagic and Avid in the NLE space) as competition, but a company doing £30m a year in revenue is barely a blip on their radar (Adobe did nearly $20b in revenue in FY23).
Second, for the lowend market that Affinity serves, Adobe Express (its Canva compete) and Photoshop Express ($35 a year) are going to be enough for most of the core users. And Canva has quickly taken on the role for the low cost design tool of choice for normies who want to collaborate. I don’t use it for anything fancy, but I am not going to lie and say it isn’t better/faster at making YouTube thumbnails than basically anything else. Canva is the competitor, not Affinity. And Canva is being smart by buying a tool/team with a lot of users that they have the opportunity to now integrate with Canva. Will that integration be any good? I don’t know. But the leading web tool now has a native app component.
But make no mistake, Adobe has zero incentive to lower its prices for its core products at this time (the web products are a different story). The challenge it faces is when users at scale opt for similarly priced alternatives (Figma over XD, Canva over Adobe Express), not the middling number of users (and I count myself as one of them, but I’m just being honest) that pay for Affinity because it is a nice low cost tool.
I cannot imagine anyone who has a real business need for Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign and has to collaborate with others (and that part is key; if you’re a solo designer who never has to share files with others, that’s great but we’re not the target audience for Adobe anyway and we probably haven’t been since the early 1990s) choosing anything other than Adobe. The $720 a year or whatever it has gone up to is just the price of doing business.
Where Adobe faces challenges is from the people who don’t need to use Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop for their work but have very strong web-based competition for specific tools. The UX teams that are standardized on Figma, even if they got XD as part of Creative Cloud, who don’t use Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, would rather pay the $45 or $75 a month to Figma. And the marketing teams that need to make graphics for social media or newsletters or whatever, would often rather pay $120 per seat for Canva than for Adobe Express (tho my recent experiments with Express show that it is getting very close to Canva in terms of capabilities and is better in some instances, Canva is prob better for that target audience, however). That’s the competition, not the offline design tools.
Maybe I'm naive but I'm not so sure Affinity will automatically end up as a subscription-based app like Canva Pro and Creative Cloud. Subscription makes sense for Canva Pro where a lot of the value add is in additional elements and templates and there's not a versioned app you can buy with a certain set of features. For a tool where you release discrete versions with new features it's a lot easier to just sell it as one-off purchases.
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
Looking at Canva’s pricing page makes me glad I have a perpetual license to Affinity’s products. Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher? I don’t need new features, but I do care about bug fixes and such.
I depend on Affinity products, and am not sure how to take this news. When Adobe tried to buy Figma, I knew both companies very well and knew equally well that Adobe would ruin Figma if they owned it. I'm glad that it didn't happen. But I don't know anything about Canva as a company. Product acquisitions usually have a certain trajectory, and my default assumption is that this will follow it: deeper, unasked-for integration with Canva's other products, a new pricing model, a brand new feature roadmap driven by the desire to make back their money, the departure of key figures from Affinity about a year from now. I hope I'm wrong though!
Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal.
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
This is a rather backhanded take. From what I understand of Melanie, she is one of the few folks I've read about that had a rather unique rags to riches story, and is quite driven. I don't begrudge her level of success.
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
Canva powers the scam market. It's played a big part helping the scam market expand. Everything from "make money online" creative to flooding Etsy with poorly designed AI garbage to crypto scams. Canva and Stan are the peanut butter and jelly of scammery in 2024.
>Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
These kind of acquisitions always astonish me. How does a web company that essentially sells toys get the money to purchase a company that sells professional desktop products?
It's 'valued' at $40bn, so if you can figure out the particulars of their VC rain dance, I imagine there's plenty of capital available for acquisitions.
Shame. Purchased a V2 suite licence despite being perfectly happy with V1 because I wanted to support them, I don’t see anything good coming from merging with Canva.
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/