Tia Lapis

This Team has nothing to decide anymore. Canva is deciding and I don't trust them further than I can throw a truck...

The problem is that Serif hasn't any deciding power anymore - They sold out. All deciding happens at Canva now. And all the gloom thems from people not trusting Canva.

And off I am. I have enough of getting f***ed over by such aquisions. My last "no we will continue perpentual licenses, don't fear there will be no changes" has been Zbrush. Serif, or Canva - you just lost a customer.

Being a big faceless corporation?

Being a big faceless corporation?

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

And off I am. I have enough of getting f***ed over by such aquisions. My last "no we will continue perpentual licenses, don't fear there will be no changes" has been Zbrush. Serif, or Canva - you just lost a customer.

How important we are to Canva can be seen in the fact that Canva didn't even see it needed to introduce themself and their Company to the community. How should that build trust in them?

This Team has nothing to decide anymore. Canva is deciding and I don't trust them further than I can throw a truck...

This Team has nothing to decide anymore. Canva is deciding and I don't trust them further than I can throw a truck...

This Team has nothing to decide anymore. Canva is deciding and I don't trust them further than I can throw a truck...

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

Good first use case for AI 🙂

A "Pledge" ist not a promise and "we are committed to" is very different from "we are going to" -- sorry, but while this is a nice gesture, I've heard this noncommittal language way to often (in recent years even from our gouvernment with their listening, their commitments and the famous "five pledges") to believe any of it.
As I have spend a good amount of time of learning Affinity and moving all my work to it I'll stick with it for the time being. Worst case is that my version 2.4 stays as it is and I'll use it until I don't find a computer that runs it anymore.
Given that Serif just got handed a large sack of money, I won't do any free beta testing from now on though, and only install further updates if they have something I need rather than looking forward to playing with a new toy and being happy about everything I discover.
The software has hopped from "a journey I enjoy being part of" to "a tool I use to earn a living". My feeling towards Serif has shifted from "fan" and "advocate" to "user" respectively "customer" with a simple business relationship that can be cancelled the moment "the product doesn't meet expectations".

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

This will be broken as every similar pledge has been broken on other aquisitions. Maxon promised the same for Zbrush. 2 years later: subscription only and no real update in all this time. It is just marketing trying to soften the blow to the users - IT WILL BE BROKEN. 

Affinity, be cautious with your statements and actions from this point forward. Any deviation, even the smallest from the promises you have made to us in the past, could result in the loss of customers.
We all have had bad experiences with such alliances in the past, and this came to us like a bolt from the blue. We are all tense, nervous and this will be reflected in our work as well as in our everyday life. My personal opinion is that it will never be the same again for any of us.
I ask you once again to be careful what you do or your business may come crashing down like a house of cards and Adobe will win without investing a cent.

My friend you coping too hard. Relax. I understand you wasted so many time for all this comments and etc. But we all understand what is going to happen. Today is the day Affinity died for designers. Its a fact. You say you prefer to believe Serif, but 1.5 years ago they said no one gonna buy them. And here we are. There is no more Serif, btw. Its Canva now. So you are prefering to believe what Canva says.
I don't believe them. Canva will kill Affinity in a year or so. That's it. Canva is not an Adobe competitor. Affinity had a chance to be one.

Canva has 135 million monthly active users, and dreams of many more. Affinity has 3 million customers who have purchased the programs, which are notably known for NOT wanting to spend a lot of money on software.
You have nothing to threaten with. Canva dreams of growth, and achieves it through the large markets and customer groups. The small loyal Affinity club's maneuvers are less than meaningless, and you can expect that it has been accounted for in the risk assessment as a minor point.
You should worry more about what actually happens with Affinity. If you change your minds, and would like to pay a subscription, but Affinity is phased out or unbearably changed towards the needs of the broad and unqualified masses' graphics, so that you cannot be creative yourselves, then it doesn't matter anyway.
See the whole thing from a higher perspective. Canva is the most irrelevant company that could acquire Serif, and I cannot take the talk about Canva enriching Serif with resources seriously. I cannot see Affinity as a product with significant growth potential in itself, and certainly not as products Canva knows anything about, and suddenly will be experts in. Serif is a sardine in the Atlantic Ocean.
Turn the discussion towards the future of the products as a whole; it's not certain there will be any product to cry over the price of in 5 years.

Haha, clearly no hope.
I've bought Luxology Modo (3d) at early stage, perpetual license was their credo, nice team, great communication. They sold to Foundry, big CG company, with the exact same speech, almost word to word (really, i laught reading the CEO's text...). One year later : subscription. Two years later : Modo was almost killed by Foundry and is now barely alive...
I've bought ZBrush at early stage, perpetual license, free upgrades for years and years (incredible, by the way...). They sold to Maxxon, another big CG company. Well, do i need to tell the story ? You get it. (except Maxxon didn't kill it, at least)
I' m out of this business now, so no big deal for me, but i could bet my house on the licence policy's future... 
Sorry for you, pro guys.

Hi All,

I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.
This is a moment of great excitement, anticipation, and profound gratitude for all of you who have been part of our story so far. 
We know that those of you who’ve put your faith in Affinity, some since we launched our very first Mac app, will have questions about what this means for the future of our products. Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish. We've worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable. 
None of that changes today.
In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities which previously would never have been achievable. 
Canva’s revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together. 
I want to express my deepest gratitude to our incredible Affinity team. Your passion, dedication, and relentless pursuit of excellence have been the driving force behind our success so far, and I can’t wait to continue this journey with you all. 
To our loyal users and the creative community, your support and feedback have been invaluable. You’ve inspired us to push boundaries and continuously improve, and we’re excited to embark on this new chapter together. 
The future is bright, and I am incredibly excited to continue our story together and create a world where design is within everyone's reach.
With heartfelt thanks,
Ash
For more information...
We have made four pledges to the Affinity community which you can read here. We have included some FAQs at the bottom of the announcement article here. A video message from me with some more background is on YouTube here. This announcement post is locked, but I have included a duplicate of it in the questions forum here which you can respond to.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash
This is a duplicate post of a thread that is now locked and moved to the questions forum

it is safe to say that Apple *PAYED* Xerox with Apple shares. The only one ripping off here was Microsoft.