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They did. The head of Flourish came to Serif recently and recounted a very positive experience when Flourish were purchased by Canva.

I mean, yeah, that article’s title makes even more sense now, considering how regulators would see an acquisition of Canva by Adobe as even more of a problem… Overall, from what I’ve read today, I am a bit less concerned about Canva’s future in that regard.
The jury is, sadly, still out on Affinity’s future inside of the “Canva family”, as they like to call it, but Flourish’s apparently preserved identity does seem to be a positive indicator (I actually had some colleague suggest it as a tool during one of our PhD seminars and I didn’t even suspect it was owned by Canva, so there’s that). It does seem to be cloud- and subscription-based, on a freemium model, and maybe it already was before, which would mean they already had extra synergies with Canva as a company. The latter suddenly having perpetual licenses and offline apps in their portfolio would indeed represent a pivot, or a diversification, on their business model, and if they stick to it and respect us all in the process, and further shield themselves from hostile takeovers, hey, more power to them, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

I really hope Affinity doesn't go subscription because I need it. I was still using InDesign CS4, and was delighted to discover Affinity. My reason was price, but I found that I prefer Designer  to Illustrator for drawing maps.  And although I struggled a bit with Publisher at first I love it now.  I am currently setting a very big, very academic book which has a great many endnotes, and crucially, cross references to the endnotes. Publisher does a beautiful job of cross referencing, and I was amazed to discover that InDesign still can't do a cross reference like "see noteX on pageY". So Affinity is ahead of the game here, and I sincerely hope I will be able to afford it in a year's time, when the next book in the series needs setting.

In a year, and probably much longer (if your OS allows it), the current V2 will still work - no need to buy anything else if you don't want to.

The cloud is important, yes. But IMO, for a user/market niche. For Canva's main current user profile (I think the whole point of the Affinity apps line added is to add a new niche, with many sub niches itself), it makes a lot of sense. They have all the gazillion of Canva's assets in the cloud, and light (very light) apps to do very basic things (what those users can really do), those can be all web apps, on a browser. For a bit higher end, you are handling heavy files for print with many layers, specially if it's raster work (like complex illustrations that happen not to be vector based, or not fully). Even overly complex (many nodes and objects) vector files could mean a problem (processing, etc). Even just in photography, editing large RAW files is a too heavy duty for both being a browser app (although being cloud based does not imply the need of a browser based app, I know) or access to disk through a whichever connection (weaker part being mostly in the client side), and then whatever is the state of the disc access in the cloud machines, or just CPU/GPU performance required, not so great in browser apps. So, the cloud's need and usefulness I guess it depends on the market niche. 

Yes, at the current level of Adobe's developments (and considering their cloud covers many more areas, as you say, so is never apples to apples) that is unthinkable, as Adobe is not "stopped". Unlike a lot of people say (angry with Adobe), Photoshop and the other apps do progress a lot, and the company last time I checked had 26.000 (surely more, now) souls working worldwide (versus the 90 people in Affinity, yet they have made a functional suite to do a lot of what three of the main Adobe apps do). Then also, even if Canva made of Affinity a "cloud" suite to compete at that level, investing giga loads of cash to become as capable, just for the existence of a similar alternative (but again! that's only in capabilities.. we must not forget implantation in companies, that's huge to fight against), then this sole possible choice would decrease the price of both, almost guaranteed.  That's true competition. But that would need such a titanic use of resources, while if instead, keeping Affinity how it is (even if not making a faster pace! just allowing its survival), slowly gaining terrain to Adobe in certain parcels, does seem a lot smarter, requiring a lot lower investment, yet actively grabbing more market. 

I'm curious... One of our Australian forum members, MikeV, discards this possibility, due to Canva's HQ happening to be in Sydney, Australia, and how Australian regulators are tending to deal with this sort of thing there :

" Adobe takeover
One of the concerns raised in this thread is the potential for Adobe to buy Canva – given the mood and direction of Australian competition regulators I think this is so unlikely that it does not figure in my calculations. "   

After  what has happened with Figma (Adobe tried to acquire it recently), apparently this is not such an automatic thing to expect, these days. There are some articles about it : 
https://www.afr.com/technology/no-one-can-buy-canva-now-other-start-ups-beware-20231220-p5esr8
Edit: Ouch, sorry. It seems that article is partially behind a paywall...  I could read it completely, but it seems for some reason it only shows up full when searching some stuff in Google, not accessing it directly... (I am not familiar with that site, BTW). But one of  the key points of it is that Australian companies have it pretty hard to do such operation now, due to regulation (what MikeV described).

What I am finding more in Google goes more in the lines of several sources expecting more of a competition from Canva against Adobe, grabbing more market from Adobe in the low, to low-mid end. Obviously Adobe will keep non challenged in the very high end, not just as its apps are immensely more advanced and professional, but -almost more important- because many industries (not only the game and film industries) have their pipelines, workflows, custom solutions, trained teams, tightly tied to Adobe. But a huge pie of the market is the low end (175 millions of users in Canva is no small thing) and part of a bit higher tier.

Even more the case when our skills are less and less needed (and I can't understand why people don't realize that this is the biggest danger for artists, designers, photographers, etc, but not just from Canva, but any apps with full AI art and design generation, like MidJourney , Dall-E, etc), so, the low end users can finally do a lot of work without our services (in Canva, and similar solutions), and then, the "pie" that canva can grab is significantly bigger than what it was the potential Canva's user base before. WAY more the case if they start implementing Affinity's tech inside Canva solutions (to an extent... I don't see a lot of their user base getting super technical! It's not that profile), and also keeping the branch of Affinity's standalone suite. As in, I think it aspires to way more  than the social media graphics and fast stuff for marketing people and small business owners saving bucks on designers and artists that it was its market till now. This challenges a large chunk of Adobe's user base. And from what I am digging out there, it seems I was not the only one suspecting that Canva's thing is not to be bought, but to compete with the giant, as at this point, well, it's a giant itself and it has a lot to win.
I am not saying this to challenge your opinion. I am genuinely curious about all this matter, and I might be wrong, as I'm just barely reading about these things now, pretty ignorant in finances stuff, and English is not my first language, but seems to be there quite a bunch of articles supporting this theory and right now I am not finding anything suggesting the possibility of an Adobe--> Canva buyout. But who knows.
 

Yes, I know how it has always been said that people with a very specific profile (Serif counted on a bunch of very high profile from previous developments to Affinity) are hard to find. And I believe it to be true. But! Loads of cash go a very long way to find them even under a rock.    That and contacts, professional networks that the new almost-giant has.
About the time... we have had recent events (avoiding specifics to not open that can of worms) in the world which demonstrated that while it was believed that "certain thing" could be only be developed in 10 to 20 years, with enough money and common effort thrown at it, not only one, but a bunch of several "brands" solutions were "up and running" in just one year (not talking about AI... this time ) . 
I believe in the power of money  . Realistic enough?      (doesn't mean that I like materialism, quite the opposite. But it is what it is)

Hello, Serif team
I am a recent member of the Affinity family, but I feel like it's just that. There's a lot of negativity surrounding this new deal, and I wanted to make sure you also get encouragement. I think the pledges are great. If you stay true to them, keep Affinity standalone and professional, and integrate it with Canva in the future in order to allow professional designers create templates in Affinity for marketers to use in Canva, this will be a groundbreaking workflow for the world of design.
There isn't a single piece of software out there that solves the problem of professionals who enjoy non-destructive, complex softwares such as Affinity collaborating with marketers who enjoy the simplicity of something like Canva templates.
I hope the entire team is as excited as I am for the future of Affinity. Keep Affinity professional, Canva for the beginners or non-designers, and you'll have yourselves the best design suite on the market.
This is a web agency owner's (extremely passionate about Studio Link and your design suite) wishlist of features to come from the new Canva resources:
Blend tool functionality Real vector brushes, not rasters on vector paths Real vector patterns, not rasters repeating on vector shapes Variable font support Smart object import functionality in Affinity Publisher Canva, please pay for additional developers to handle bug fixing, there are some persistent bug threads here that haven't been solved in 3-4 years Better transfer of Adobe format documents (I know, I know, it's closed-source format and the idea is to bring people over FROM Adobe, but sadly we still live in a world dominated by .ai .psd and .indd) for example the constant non 0 font tracking makes importing large document a real pain Export persona for all Affinity apps (I shouldn't have to open designer to export a batch of 10-20 logos I've been working on in Publisher) Generally way more Studio Link integration. Having a suite is great, but what you've developed in Studio Link is something special. Maybe Develop, Liquify, Export should become Modules rather than standalone personas in other apps. So that people would be able to add modules to their unified app (currently Publisher) just as we would add panels right now. Even if it requires a restart of the app, people would be able to make their one design app as slim or all-encompassing as they want. Some sort of image tracing capability Point-based gradients/Gradient meshes Some sort of vector filters suite (roughen, smoothen curve, distort, background distort, etc.) This is a list I'd been keeping for the past months, working on small business and big corporate website and design projects alike, using exclusively your suite for professional designs.
Let's make this thread a place for positivity and genuine recommendations for the future of our favourite design suite. The serif team seem to be very excited and eager to bring the best design tools out there into existence for us.
So let's make it happen together.
Tudor.

Yes, at the current level of Adobe's developments (and considering their cloud covers many more areas, as you say, so is never apples to apples) that is unthinkable, as Adobe is not "stopped". Unlike a lot of people say (angry with Adobe), Photoshop and the other apps do progress a lot, and the company last time I checked had 26.000 (surely more, now) souls working worldwide (versus the 90 people in Affinity, yet they have made a functional suite to do a lot of what three of the main Adobe apps do). Then also, even if Canva made of Affinity a "cloud" suite to compete at that level, investing giga loads of cash to become as capable, just for the existence of a similar alternative (but again! that's only in capabilities.. we must not forget implantation in companies, that's huge to fight against), then this sole possible choice would decrease the price of both, almost guaranteed.  That's true competition. But that would need such a titanic use of resources, while if instead, keeping Affinity how it is (even if not making a faster pace! just allowing its survival), slowly gaining terrain to Adobe in certain parcels, does seem a lot smarter, requiring a lot lower investment, yet actively grabbing more market. 

Why do you regret having bought it? Never mind any positive impact on Affinity, what about a positive impact on you?
As a user of both Windows and iPadOS, the launch offer discount of very nearly 40% for the Universal Licence was too good to pass up, even if I never get a MacBook or an iMac. Development of version 1 has ceased, so without the upgrade I would have been stuck with its bugs and would have missed out on numerous improvements and new features.

Nonsense. Nobody labeled anybody a "dirty" anything! One can be optimistic or pessimistic about the eventual outcome of the purchase for both customers & the (former?) Serif staff, & a lot of forum members have done that, but there is no cultism involved. However, it is pretty well accepted among mental health experts that constant, excessive pessimism (or for that matter optimism) is unhealthy, so there is nothing wrong I can see with expressing concern about that.

Particularly ones that seem improbable, like Canva just buying Serif so they can eventually kill or cripple Affinity more or less like Adobe did with Freehand.
Then there is this pervasive (in this topic anyway) worry about Canva completely eliminating the Affinity perpetual licensing model & transitioning to a subscription only model. Seriously, how stupid does anyone think Canva would have to be to do that & compete head to head with Adobe for subscriptions? If they want to get any real, lasting value from the purchase, they would either have to be planning to drastically undercut Adobe's subscription prices & hope to sell boatloads of subscriptions to eventually see a reasonable return on their investment, or spend a ton of money on making Affinity much more powerful & feature-rich than what Adobe offers (including more apps in the suite like a full-featured DAM, a dedicated animation app, & so on), which seems so improbable as to be absurd even to consider.

Hello! I've been away from the forums for a while, but decided to drop in tonight. I stumbled across this post, and I just wanted to say congratulations on closing the deal, and that I really admire you and your team. You guys have been pure class from day one, and have taught me a lot about what it means to be a professional and a creative. In that regard, I still have a long long way to go. However, I am certain that I have learned so much more than just how to use your software.
As for the acquisition, when I saw the video announcement and felt the air I could only imagine what a difficult decision it must have been. I admit that like many others I had a moment of despair, but it was relatively brief. I have been using your software for a few years now, but I feel like I am just now hitting my stride. You see, you guys have made it possible for all kinds of people to chase their dreams; or at the very least find a respite from the world in their hobby of choice. At any rate, it gives people hope and some kind of potential to work towards. Entire communities have sprung up around Affinity as a result. This in turn creates a powerful sense of belonging. People don't want to lose these things.  They don't want to lose that hope and sense of belonging. I think this is what a lot of people are feeling at the moment, but are unable to articulate. They're reacting in anger because they are subconsciously afraid their hopes and dreams will die. 
I am confident, that with time, people will see that you have held to your pledges regarding mission, practices, and pricing. They will see your software offerings continue to improve and excel. The negativity will pass. I suspect you have already considered much of what I have said here, but I felt compelled to chime in. There doesn't seem to be enough encouragement to go around these days. Please keep going. Don't give in to the neigh sayers or the pitchfork mob, and don't let it affect the way you conduct yourselves. Please continue to work confidently and proudly with your heads held high. Thank you for everything thus far. 
Cheers, and best wishes on the next leg of your journey. 🍻

Realism, in the sense of being realistic, means to consider that which is real (tangible, existent) in the here & now. Pessimism & optimism are about considering what might happen in the future. 

Contrary. I am a full-stack web-dev (Js on the client side, PHP on the server side, RDBMS like Maria DB, SQL is my passion).
During my professional career, I have had the opportunity to help implement cloud solutions, although this is not my main domain.
With the right people who have knowledge in storage, servers, databases, networking, software and analytics, this is no challenge at all.
Fortunately, I had the pleasure of working with such people.
From what I have seen so far, how some functions have been implemented in Affinity, I think that they also have people with appropriate competences who, supported by dedicated cloud system specialists, could easily push this topic forward.

FYI on the Affinity and Canva pledge page, there's a Google Forms for feedback regarding the acquisition and new features: https://affin.co/shareyourthoughts
I forgot to mention an on-canvas stroke weight editing feature (as opposed to editing the profile curve) in mine 😅
 

Philosophical theories apart, there's clearly a good chance for the future of Affinity and its users of being bright, more than before, now with a strong company behind it. And from what MikeV told us, it seems to be a better actor than those that tend to make these big operations, and also from what he explained, the possibility of an Adobe buyout is unlikely due to Australian regulation (as was said in the initial video, Canva is an Australian company, HQ in Sydney, if I'm not wrong). Yet so, it doesn't harm to be training in other tools as well (I might have like 40 tools graphics related installed, lol), it will expand everyone's knowledge, and for some, it would probably cure their anxiety. I understand that those not being solo freelancers (hello), neither hobbyists, but having the responsibility of a full organization (even if it is only a few workers) have quite less margin, more compromises and responsibilities, and so, more reasons to be anxious. But till some extent they might be able to apply a bit of this, hopefully. Anyway, I've got a good feeling about the whole thing.

Let's just clarify. Affinity exists exactly as it did last month.  It now has different owners.
The development teams and management teams still exist, with a few exceptions at the top.
The roadmap as stated by the new owners is the same as Affinity had, just accelerated a bit.

The only thing you are correct on is that Canva now has control of the roadmap.  Though from all indications they don't look as though they are going to change it much in the short term.  Medium term I think there will be some changes to fit with Canva. Long term is anyone's guess, depending on what happens in the short-medium term. However the Affinity team will have an influence on that as they know their market.
 

But constant pessimism will eventually propagate into a person's overall mood and attitude.
Not necessarily wanting to end up as a "grumpy old man", my preferred method of facing life is what I call "adaptive pragmatism" (after all, I was born and grew up in Prague, y'know… ) with focus on the now and the near foreseeable future. That has worked for me pretty well since several decades.
And that's how I'm facing this takeover as well, after absorbing and processing my initial Tuesday Shock™:
Why worry now about highly hypothetical things that may or may not happen in a distant future?

I'm embarrassed to admit that I was not confusing historical figures (which I didn't even know about, ouch,   )... it's waay less sophisticated. In Spanish it's written "Sídney", so, that's why   😅 .

And even more confusion that Sydney is named after Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (February 1733 to June 1800) who made the decision to establish a colony in Australia in his role as Secretary of State for the Home Office. He was the son of Charles Townshend, the 2nd Viscount Townshend – this was the second use of the Viscount Sydney title after the first line died out with Henry Sydney in 1704 – he was the last of the line mentioned by Alfred. And it appears Sidney and Sydney were used interchangeably at several points. It's enough to make your brain hurt.

This is Good News as it could suggest that Canva brought Affinity to stop any attempt by Adobe (or Microsoft?) to buy Canva.  The time scales fit.   The deal fell apart in December. I assume Canva would have been watching and planning.
With Canva owning Affinity, which is becoming a competitor of Adobe, the monopoly rules etc would stop such a buy-out by Adobe. Certainly a hostile one.
So it is in Canva's interests to keep developing Affinity to compete with Adobe.  The best way to do that is, apart from developing the apps more, is the perpetual licence.
This might not be a bad situation for affinity users.

Here is an archived version of the article before it got paywalled https://archive.is/tpn6p so everyone can read it.
  
Exactly what's on my mind. Also it's exactly the reason why artists are mad and starting to ai-poison their artworks. EU just started talking about control of ai and its usage, let's hope they will take us in account.
Hollywood lobby got their way around video piracy, we should want to do the same to protect us. Especially for those who use LAION-5B dataset for their commercial ai models.
Well, I personally am not fan of the takeover and worry that Affinity as we know it will cease to exist and will be turned into something different. I switched back to Adobe CC for my business needs when I saw no real progress in V2, yet I still use sometimes for some small personal projects, just because I'm sorry to let the money I've spent on it and the many add-ons burn.
We'll see if the pledge is true and Canva will help Serif to grow Affinity to a better suite.

I'm curious... One of our Australian forum members, MikeV, discards this possibility, due to Canva's HQ happening to be in Sydney, Australia, and how Australian regulators are tending to deal with this sort of thing there :

" Adobe takeover
One of the concerns raised in this thread is the potential for Adobe to buy Canva – given the mood and direction of Australian competition regulators I think this is so unlikely that it does not figure in my calculations. "   

After  what has happened with Figma (Adobe tried to acquire it recently), apparently this is not such an automatic thing to expect, these days. There are some articles about it : 
https://www.afr.com/technology/no-one-can-buy-canva-now-other-start-ups-beware-20231220-p5esr8
Edit: Ouch, sorry. It seems that article is partially behind a paywall...  I could read it completely, but it seems for some reason it only shows up full when searching some stuff in Google, not accessing it directly... (I am not familiar with that site, BTW). But one of  the key points of it is that Australian companies have it pretty hard to do such operation now, due to regulation (what MikeV described).

What I am finding more in Google goes more in the lines of several sources expecting more of a competition from Canva against Adobe, grabbing more market from Adobe in the low, to low-mid end. Obviously Adobe will keep non challenged in the very high end, not just as its apps are immensely more advanced and professional, but -almost more important- because many industries (not only the game and film industries) have their pipelines, workflows, custom solutions, trained teams, tightly tied to Adobe. But a huge pie of the market is the low end (175 millions of users in Canva is no small thing) and part of a bit higher tier.

Even more the case when our skills are less and less needed (and I can't understand why people don't realize that this is the biggest danger for artists, designers, photographers, etc, but not just from Canva, but any apps with full AI art and design generation, like MidJourney , Dall-E, etc), so, the low end users can finally do a lot of work without our services (in Canva, and similar solutions), and then, the "pie" that canva can grab is significantly bigger than what it was the potential Canva's user base before. WAY more the case if they start implementing Affinity's tech inside Canva solutions (to an extent... I don't see a lot of their user base getting super technical! It's not that profile), and also keeping the branch of Affinity's standalone suite. As in, I think it aspires to way more  than the social media graphics and fast stuff for marketing people and small business owners saving bucks on designers and artists that it was its market till now. This challenges a large chunk of Adobe's user base. And from what I am digging out there, it seems I was not the only one suspecting that Canva's thing is not to be bought, but to compete with the giant, as at this point, well, it's a giant itself and it has a lot to win.
I am not saying this to challenge your opinion. I am genuinely curious about all this matter, and I might be wrong, as I'm just barely reading about these things now, pretty ignorant in finances stuff, and English is not my first language, but seems to be there quite a bunch of articles supporting this theory and right now I am not finding anything suggesting the possibility of an Adobe--> Canva buyout. But who knows.