000

Don't worry guys, AI will decimate the industry within five years anyway. There won't even be any point to software by then.

https://x.com/affinitybyserif/status/1570728566350020608?s=20

This is not going to end well. I just upgraded to v2 and have invested in numerus  add-ons and am now feeling regret at the money spent. All due respect but "no plans currently" doesn't mean jack. Unfortunately the marriage looks to be over and I wont be investing any more money into this software. Real shame I felt part of a community, now already feel like a customer.

@BofG Paying per release is not a dead business model. The subscription model exists only when consumers won't balk against it. It's not a consumer-oriented model. It's profit oriented. Honestly, I'm amazed Adobe got away with it. Photoshop and Illustrator were bloated and riddled with UI bugs when they went subscription-only.
Late-stage capitalism ... gotta love it.

It happens again, and again, and again, and again..
It's the start of platform decay.

We’ve all seen this type of acquisition before, and no amount of marketing copy will dissuade the well-founded fears of this community. Unless Serif has strong guarantees from Canva in writing, it’s pretty obvious that they will become a lemon for the parent company to squeeze until there’s nothing left. That’s almost always the outcome.
Canva is awful software. If I’f known Serif would be owned by Canva eventually, I never would have purchased a V2 license. This is a pretty big betrayal of our trust.

Time to look for a new home ! Open source alternatives are not where I'd want them to be (otherwise I wouldn't be using Affinity!), but they're building up in strength & versatility. Inkscape has some rough edges but is a very, very capable vector program. Krita is unequalled at painting. Gimp isn't ideal right now but they're nearing a "modern" 3.0 release, let's see how that goes. Graphite.rs is young but veeeery promising. I don't really have a Publisher alternative to offer, though.
Farewell ! it's been nice.

Like many I’m greatly disappointed at this announcement and reeks of Adobe all over again trying to say how much a benefit the changes are for the customers (those that helped financially build this company).
Businesses have one purpose in life and that is to make money. Anything that improves the bottom line is taken advantage of. The appalling subscription services prevalent everywhere in life nowadays is a cancer on society and especially on software.
Any business sell out/buy out/takeover has only one purpose and that is to boost profits. The likes of Adobe couldn’t care less about non-professional users, they make a substantial profit from their enterprise customers. CEO’s very quickly forget that it is the smaller scale users that paid for the company’s development before attracting professional and enterprise customers. In most cases that is a result of the individuals recommending the product to their seniors and those holding the purse string.
I seriously hope I’m wrong but watch this space - another Adobe style sell out is on the way.
 
 

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

I want to believe you. But also I want you to know that at this instant moment, you are haemorrhaging your trust and credibility at the creative community on Mastodon. I can see nothing but despair and deception on my timeline.

Honestly Ash this is not first time I am seeing this, and none of what you say now, really kept. All of the software that I use, and that were purchased like this, end up as only subscription model, and their development pace was cut half. Same talk. Same promises and wishes, and outcome is always the same. It would be huge surprise for me that different happens to Affinity.

Considering how many “funds” Canva has “raised” in the past few years and how many venture capital campanies are involved, I have a VERY bad feeling about this.
The forced marketing speech (“joining the family”, yeah, sure) in the announcement doesn’t halp.
I guess that it’s probably a good way for all Serif employees to get a nice retirement in 3 to 5 years, but it’s a buckshot in the face for me as a happy user and supporter of an independent company that makes professional software I use every day.

I'm happy for the Serif staff, but far less happy for us users.
There's always the potential for some beneficial synergy, but history and common sense suggest that this is the beginning of the end of the Affinity suite as we know it.
Of course I agree with others that moving to a subscription model will shed me as a customer forever. But, even more problematic would be to turn the Affinity suite into web apps, or even applications that require frequent network access -- that would be simply awful.
It's already problem enough that I need to connect to the Internet to register v2, even once at initial install. 

That's a shame, I was looking forward to the day that Affinity introduced AI selection methods for sky, people etc (not interested in AI creation of parts of a scene) but I'd guess if that ever happens now it will be after Canva have introduced a subscription pricing and that's when I'll go back to Adobe.

🙁 I hope nothing changes as you say but have a bad feeling about this too. So far my experience with these takeovers has not been good.  I really hope you don't introduce subscriptions at any point because at that time I will have to cease my relationship with Affinity.  I will keep my fingers crossed.

I have been using Capture One Pro professionally for 20+ years. Once their moneymen got their hands on it and changed it to a silly price subscription I stopped updating it at v22. There probably will be no way to continue to use v22 once Windows 12 comes out.
I stopped Adobe Photoshop after CS6 because of subscription, and moved to Affinity Photo for any work that Capture One could not do such as complex batch processing, adding borders, and at that time healing and cloning tools. I also moved from Dreamweaver to Squarespace though that was for different reasons as Squarespace has quite pricey annual fees.
This announcement is worrisome. Seems that subscription only will be taking over the World in all software. what happens if you no longer want to subscribe but you do want to re-edit old files - you are caught just like with Adobe in which you have to restart and then stop again.
Canva looks horrible to me. My main interest would be in video editing but Davinci Studio works great and is a one off cost of just $300; I moved from Vegas a couple of years ago as their update costs got silly.

Abode looks interesting but the page has not been updated since July 22, 2023 as far as I can tell.

You helped us start a movement. Today, that movement becomes a revolution.
Stop yourself, Ash. We're not children. Rhetoric doesn't change reality, nauseating rhetoric just cuts away all credibility, adding insult to injury.
We've seen this twenty? forty? a hundred times? before. A few years ago, German Gravit was acquired by Corel, and Corel wrote "Welcome to the Corel family". It's not a family. I followed the individual German founders' naive optimism on their LinkedIn profiles, but today they are FIRED and Gravit is no longer being developed. A few years later, Corel changed plans, and the little fish discovered the concept of restructuring and downsizing. That wasn't family. It was melting down and minimising.
Serif, I have long urged you to become mature and professionals as a company internally, to survive as a company or to avoid this happening. You lacked the ability or will to do so, you have fundamentally failed in developing the company's culture, structure, and professionalism over several decades and now we see this business bullshit and we well know where it ends! You have simply failed monumentally, and if you had read a bit in both business history books and general history books, then you would know how tragically many revolutions have ended.
I am not afraid of subscriptions like the others. I see far more serious things happening within a couple of years with the products, and I'm starting to take my precautions today. Thank goodness I only use Designer. Maybe I and we are lucky, but precautions are there to ensure the worse scenario.
And to all you fanboys in here I have chided for years: this is where a lack of professionalism ends, and you also have a part in it. I hold the mentality accountable for it ending here.

Yep, as Ash said, nothing changes.... until it does.

It definitely feels like we've been played, lied to, burned, on sold if you will. But, unfortunately, it's a timely reminder that entire the world revolves around money. And as a business grows to the heights of Affinity, it's no longer about "satisfying end user", it all about satisfying the wants of investors, and lining the pockets of those at the top. Us mere peasants serve no purpose but to buy into the startup story, and consume, over and over again. The sad reality is, most won't switch to the competition, because they're just as bad, so instead we'll stick with the lessor of two evils. But only time will tell, I guess.