StevenS

Hi Roto, welcome to the Affinity forum.
As many of our apps are bought through third party App Stores we do not have a mechanism to offer upgrade pricing to all of our users. This was why we decided to offer such a large launch discount—to give all users, new and existing, and irrespective of how they bought our V1 apps an opportunity to get V2 at an incredible price. V1 owners who do purchase during the launch period will receive bonus content at a later date.
Upgrading is completely optional and, if you wish, you can continue to use the V1 apps for as long as you like.
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.

El código QR solo vincula a las descargas de la tienda de aplicaciones para que las personas puedan encontrar las aplicaciones fácilmente.
The QR code only links to the App Store downloads for people to the find the apps easily.

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

@Claudio60 no worries  We match the prices on our own site to those on the App Store. Microsoft individually set the price for each currency, as such there may be some slight differences between currencies across the three stores.

That is correct, however the US price does not include any sales tax, whereas the Euro price includes VAT which makes up the difference that you are seeing.

Hi,
80 pounds for one license, once you add to cart it will automatically calculate price for 2 licenses and up.

Potentially, however issues may arise if they ever need to install again for whatever reason and they would not be able to do so quickly or easily.
I am not aware of such a restriction, but it would make sense for there to be one. With there being no gifting option two Universal Licences on one account would not be needed.
I cannot think of a practical workaround at this current time, but I will continue suggesting a gifting option be added in the future.

I was able to purchase the licence by changing the country on my account to the United States, making the purchase and then changing back to Romania.
 

It'd be worth reaching out to support directly perhaps, in a lot of cases people that paid full price x months before a new version can get a free upgrade, but App Store integration makes that difficult aside from handing out a one off free license.

Our teams are extremely busy at the moment and trying to work through all of the email contacts (7000+) over the last 2 days. We thank you for any patience you can afford as we endeavour to answer everyone's queries as quickly as we can.
Indeed, and they do not usually happen this frequently on our site either, however the last few days have been quite unprecedented with the volume of traffic both our site and payment systems have experienced, something that most sites don't usually experience day to day.

We have been unable to replicate the issue you have reported, but we do hear of this happening from time-to-time.
The quickest solution would be to try using PayPal as the payment option rather than credit/debit card but should wish to try a few things to get the payment through with your card, here's some advice that may help.
As required in Europe, our payment portal uses 3D Secure for all transactions, this is not the case in all other regions so it may be that your card cannot purchase through portals that use 3D Secure, or your bank is not yet setup to accept payments that use 3D Secure. As this is not something we have any control over, you will need to discuss this with your bank.
If you have purchased using a 3D Secure payment portal in the past and you know that it is not the above that is affecting the order, please ensure that your web browser and anti-virus software is up to date, also check that there aren't any browser plugins that may be preventing the security window appearing (The Honey extension especially has been known to cause issues) or try a different browser entirely. Finally check that your firewall is not blocking any part of the payment process.

thanks for the informative reply Steve, I hope everything gets sorted soon. I absolutely love the new apps btw. 

Our teams are extremely busy at the moment and trying to work through all of the email contacts (7000+) over the last 2 days. We thank you for any patience you can afford as we endeavour to answer everyone's queries as quickly as we can.
Indeed, and they do not usually happen this frequently on our site either, however the last few days have been quite unprecedented with the volume of traffic both our site and payment systems have experienced, something that most sites don't usually experience day to day.

We have not yet announced an end date for the launch offer, but as soon as we do we'll let everyone know via social media.
 

From my reading of what @StevenS gave the link for there appears to be no difference between the Serif or AppStore purchases… both give the 30 day trial and then you can upgrade either for the app or to the Universal License version… with purchases from both stores you have to activate the license by logging into your Affinity account or making one and once done your license is valid for either the single app or the universal license depending upon which one you purchased. 
So it seems that the only real difference is how you would like to update the app/apps… automatically via the AppStore or manually unless it is now automatically done from Affinity/Serif. 

We have not yet announced an end date for the launch offer, but as soon as we do we'll let everyone know via social media.
 

Thanks, Steven!!!

We have not yet announced an end date for the launch offer, but as soon as we do we'll let everyone know via social media.
 

We have not yet announced an end date for the launch offer, but as soon as we do we'll let everyone know via social media.
 

Hi @rob66, welcome to the Affinity forum.
Please see the below FAQ, if you have any further questions after reading, please let us know.
https://affinity.serif.com/learn/in-app-licence-activation/

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.
No. Please see the FAQ: 
 
 

Hi @guybrush
Please read here:
 

Thanks for the date correction. 

Hi @albertkinng,
We do not have any additional info to share at this current time, but we'll certainly have more answers on November 9th.