MarvinR

If that is the case, what do you think we should do instead of making plans? Make sacrifices to these gods; pray for divine guidance, something else?
Seriously, what does a defeatist attitude get us besides all but guaranteeing we will lose no matter what we do?

I don't disagree with you @bbrother but I'm pretty sure that getting angry is never going to change anything.
I'd much rather be as supportive of Serif and Canva as I can as I'd like to continue to use the Affinity apps going forward—but that doesn't mean I won't be constructively critical (as I've always tried to be) of the massive list of issues and shortcomings in the apps that users have had to workaround for years. The ball is really in Serif and Canva's court right now. I already know my exit strategy (back to Adobe, I've been slowly migrating back already), and I'm willing to give them some time to make good on their promises/pledges before completely abandoning the products, company, and team that I genuinely prefer, despite all of their shortcomings.
I definitely wouldn't suggest not having a backup plan, but personally I don't have much to lose by giving them the benefit of the doubt for a little bit longer—I want them to make good on their pledges. The Affinity apps today are exactly the same as they were before the announcement (with a few onboarding tutorials added in 2.4.1), with all of their bugs and quirks, along with more than a few truly delightful features that make me not want to give up on them quite just yet.
Oh, and this acquisition has made me take a serious look at Canva, and I quite like what I see. They're not perfect (nothing is), but in all honesty I feel like they're probably the best owner/partner that Serif could have ended up with—and I'm really excited to see where this goes.

Nice one @Ash. Exciting times. I love the idea that Affinity is probably going to be used in schools now.
Onwards and upwards.

Well said, I share your sentiments, especially at how this thread has been derailed with personal attacks on both the Serif employees and those with differing opinions from the vocal dissenters. I particularly appreciate Ash's contributions, and the patience shown in letting this thread rumble on as a shock/anger venting mechanism for many, when so many other companies would have shut it down.
Quite frankly, some growing up is required. Worth bearing this in mind:

For the past few years, the Affinity products have been great for me, for what I do, and have been incredible value. I've trusted the Serif team in that time and they haven't let me down; I'm willing to trust them going forwards too.

You can also find details of the four pledges we are making to our community here

To address some of what is being said on this thread...
Firstly to be clear I'm not a founder, but have been with the company for 25 years. I'm officially appointed as Managing Director of the company, but also use CEO as my title as that is my role in terms of how other countries would view it.
Both Canva and us have made 100% clear we are committing to perpetual licences always being available. That will include V3 or any other future major upgrade of our apps which are released. What's more I will say with Canva's backing we are not under the same financial pressure we would have been to release a V3 anytime soon, meaning those of you using V2 will actually benefit from more features as free updates which may previously have been held back for a V3 if that makes sense. This is of great benefit from an engineering standpoint too as we are far better testing and releasing features in smaller chunks than saving them up to package up as a sellable upgrade. 
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24113423/affinity-canva-acquisition-pledge-license-price-subscription
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/
As we have made clear there will at some point be a subscription option also which people can take if they choose to. I'm sure there will be additional benefits to that subscription in the future such as asset and document sync, sharing and collaboration and other things which naturally require a subscription as they are features which incur ongoing cost. It may also include other things which can be leveraged with a Canva subscription such as greater stock libraries of images, graphics and fonts. Hopefully that would just be considered reasonable and understandable. There will certainly not be any cynical cutting down of features or limitation of ongoing support in our existing apps just to force a subscription play.
I understand examples of previous acquisitions can make some of you fearful, but they are just historic examples - it has no bearing on what will happen in this case and we are genuinely doing something here which is very different and special. Everything I said on Tuesday, and what both Canva and us pledged yesterday, is 100% true and we are going to stand by it. That includes keeping our entire team here with no layoffs, and continuing to be based in Nottingham. 
If you want to believe this or not is up to you, I'm not sure what more we can say at this point to convince those who doubt it. We'll deliver on this over the coming months and years so whatever is being said right now I know it's going to be all good and assuming you are still using Affinity apps you will be happy with how they have developed and that we have continued to be fair and inclusive with our pricing.
Also to follow on from Patricks point - I can take some of the personal attacks on me, but I have to say some of the conduct on this thread with some of you being very quick to attack other community members just because they hold different opinions is really disheartening to see. You can absolutely give your opinion on this deal for sure, and we are happy to leave this as an open forum within reason, but that does mean being courteous to other forum members and not just repeating the same points over and over.
Thanks,
Ash
 

Good luck everyone! I'm presuming that, despite shock all round, this is good news for the business, customers, and importantly, employees. And please don't forget the volunteers, like many of the people on this forum. Personally, I've created over 900 videos on YouTube in my InAffinity channel and learned a huge amount about photo editing in the process. Affinity Photo (and I presume the other apps) is a brilliant product and I am in awe of how you have created this.
Well done also on the four commitments. Wisely thought out and should help calm nerves all round.
I can empathise significantly. I was a sofware engineer in small and large companies, UK and global. I moved to marketing and general business and eventually managing mergers and acquisitions in Agilent Technologies (the $10B spin-off from HP of its original businesses), where I was the Workplace Services (facilities, security, H&S, etc) global M&A manager. The most critical element of this, amidst all the IT, HR, Finance, WPS, etc, was cultural integration. One thing we found was that when acquired, people in a company will go along with many changes for the first 100 day, but will want to settle down soon after that.
Canva sounds like a good fit with Serif but there will be differences and how these are handled is so important. Australian and UK cultures have a lot of overlap, but they are not the same. Key will be leadership, which is often misunderstood. The first layer of understanding for this is followership. Without followers, you may be a manager but you are not a leader. Leaders also need to understand psychology, a subject I studied while writing the many pages on the changingminds.org website.
I could ramble further, but you've probably had enough by now and I have a photo competition to judge and potatoes to plant.
Best wishes to all the wonderful Serif, Affinity and Canva people
.. Dave ..
 

Regarding the purchase of Affinity by Canva all I can say is I have not seen a reaction like this since Tom Cruise was cast as Jack Reacher.
And some advice (from a different movie); could we all just "Chill, Winston".

The Affinity suite is easily as good as CS6, the last version of the Adobe suite I’ve had dealing with, in a lot of ways it’s better. But the main reason for buying and dedicating my time to build a career around this suite, and convincing friends and colleagues to switch, is because it has a perpetual license. If it didn’t, then for me it would be no different to Adobe.
I welcome the pledges, how quickly they were published and that Affinity don’t shut down freedom of speech on this forum, however negative it’s been, just face the comments head on. I have a lot of admiration for that. Certainly something Adobe wouldn’t have done. The pledges have certainly put my mind, more at rest.
I will continue supporting Affinity (and Canva) going forward. Purchasing major upgrades as they happen, as I realise you guys also need funding for continued development. Good luck with the new collaboration.

Just food for thought:
1. Assume for a minute that Canva has no intention of honoring its 4 pledges. Why then would they even bother to post them? Surely they know that if they do not it will have an extremely damaging impact on the company's reputation, making it hard for them to convince customers looking for alternatives to Adobe to buy their products.
2. Consider that it has become painfully obvious that Serif does not have the resources to keep adding much requested features & fixing bugs fast enough to keep many of its users from jumping ship & supporting other software. So what else could they reasonably be expected to do besides find a company like Canva to shoulder the load?

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

On the subject of trust, one thing I trust implicitly is that nobody can predict the future with any certainty. Consequently, all these comments about what Canva and the Affinity staff will or won't do in the future is nothing more than speculation & should be treated as such.
Personally, I think the sanest course is to wait & see how this plays out over the next several months, particularly if they deliver on the promise of the accelerated update schedule with more critically needed bug fixes so many of us are aware of & hopefully some new often requested features, but if you think otherwise, so be it.

I agree. A pledge is a solemn promise, often made in a formal context. It implies more commitment, not less, than a mere promise.

Thank you to Ash, Affinity, and Canva for responding to the reaction with four clear pledges. It is really encouraging.
The V2 universal license is incredibly great value (and much welcomed by me, as I use both OS X and Windows!). I look forward to many more years of fairly priced perpetual licenses.

Thank you to the Affinity team for the clarification! I am a committed user and Affinity "evangelist" so the new 4-point announcement makes me very happy. I am also excited by the possibility of the Affinity Suite getting online collaboration features. I work with a team that uses a mix of Canva and Affinity apps so the merger would make our lives easier. 

same here. Thanks Affinity. Still waters run deep. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

Ash and the folks at Affinity have always done right by me in the past and I take him at his word. They brought us this far and I believe they will bring us more in the future. I don’t like the fact that some people are belittling the honesty and integrity of anyone based on absolutely nothing other than a crazy personal view. Let things work out and then make a decision that suits you. 

I think they have made it more than clear enough that they will not be abandoning the perpetual licence model for the Affinity apps for the foreseeable future, so no, I do not see any problem with continuing to use & support the Affinity apps. Only if they ever renege on that pledge will I have any reason not to trust them.

Come on mate, you've got to stop this. You've already accused me and others of being Canva shills, regardless of the main content of our posts. It's argument in bad faith - this thread is for discussion of the announcement of Canva's acquisition of Affinity, so surely people must be allowed to speak freely if they feel there are positives to Canva (or even the acquisition) without being accused of being shills? Or is it obligatory that we hate Canva and everything they do?
Just think logically for a second - this is a tiny forum that Affinity have full control over. Why would Serif/Canva expend business resource on shilling in a tiny forum of users, when they haven't done the same on social posts where it actually matters? If they were going to pay shills, why didn't they do that yesterday too? And if Serif didn't want people voicing dissenting opinions (which, let's be honest, they have no business incentive to do), why wouldn't they just block/mute/shadowban negative posts, or just close this and make it an announcement thread?
As my other posts here should make clear, I'm not keen on this acquisition, and I couldn't care less about sticking up for a business, big or small. But this is a discussion and I think people should be free to voice opinions without being accused of being paid actors.