tomonsight

Reading through all the posts and identifying myself with the majority of users (coming from Adobe Photshop, CorelDraw, etc. switching to Affinity because I did not want to have a subscription and enjoying their products ever since) I am hugely disappointed and critical about the outlook too. It guess it all was too good to be true ... It seems obvious that subscription based models have won the market, otherwise companies would not all go down that road. On the consumer side it is a "forced education" that you have to pay a monthly fee for everything, mobile apps, streaming, music, software and users adopt it. On the business side, seeing how gladly for example the company I work for goes into more and more subscription based services, we switch off our own servers to pay for cloud services, it all seems like the right thing to do for a software company. As much as the forums are filled with anger about subscriptions or microtransactions in games, "we all" have been feeding these models to make them successful. Specifically for Affinity I also believe that it will be very hard to find a future market position with a subscription model when your user base is essentially recruited from users who decidedly came because they did not want that business model. It is like turning a vegan market into a butcher's store and hoping your loyal customers will stay loyal. In that sense it is interesting what the strategy for Canva for that take-over was. We can strongly assume they know about the customer base and they will have an idea on that the conversion rate of Affinity users going subscription will be underwhelming. Now, when it is already a starting premise that a good portion of customers will be lost, why would you continue with the take-over? Presumably to take over technology/staff that is relevant and shut down the rest to "consolidate" the market. Is that worth the price? Shutting down a company again is just cost. The difficult question will be where to move again. There are surprisingly few good options which is - in the end - part of the plan and probably the reason for that Canva deal: To restrict the market and force users into one of the few viable options.

+1 being able to export pdfs with form elements would be amazing!