I'll be straight with this. I've been too many years in the creative media to hear this and not feel alarmed. Using a product means that we build our pipeline and our archival with projects based on proprietary formats, which then become useless (or very expensive in time to convert) if we need to switch to another toolset. The affinity platform uses a closed proprietary format, so the amount of licenses sold is already definining this power of holding clients that Canva might have seen as a prospective market to tap into. Apart from the nice words about how we all want to make a better world, your products are still tools that are used in production and this is important to have in mind.
My fear is that Canva will try to sneak in subscriptions one way or another and this seems to be the case if you read between the lines of the four pledges email that we got recently.
I don't want the pricing model to change. If AI features are introduced, they should not be part of a subscription cloud service, but offered to run on my computer as part of the perpetual license model like they do in DaVinci Resolve.
The fifth pledge that I would like to see is: "Affinity will always run on your desktop. We will never make this a SaaS platform by introducing AI or other cloud services in the desktop editor." If you need to run something heavy on processing then you should offer a cloud SaaS solution but also leave the option for any users that want to run the same tools using their own computer power. DaVinci Resolve does that. Adobe doesn't, and this is why I don't use their tools.
Other than that, I really wish that this is a good choice for Serif and that the future will be bright for them and for us using their platform. If not, alternatives will always be there in a free market and I can keep my current version forever or until it's not compatible with my OS anymore.
