Canva

[Johannes]

28 minutes ago, Johannes said:

The only non-disadvantages I see so far are

 

• Canva is a private company and has no stock market pressure
• Development could now be faster for more apps

Just a few minutes and I have to correct myself 🙄

"Canva […] prepares a long run at going public"

https://www.afr.com/technology/canva-s-billion-dollar-bet-on-a-37-year-old-nottingham-company-20240321-p5fea0

[mogsie]

Adobe will be delighted. When Affinity goes to a subscription model, as it surely will, the biggest threat to Adobe is eliminated.

[jc4d]

1 minute ago, Johannes said:

Just a few minutes and I have to correct myself 🙄

"Canva […] prepares a long run at going public"

https://www.afr.com/technology/canva-s-billion-dollar-bet-on-a-37-year-old-nottingham-company-20240321-p5fea0

Is this a sign? 😅

[jonheal]

@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.

[Ginblue]

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.

[Johannes]

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

[Ian Tompkins]

4 minutes ago, Johannes said:

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

sad-trombone.mp3

[jonwright]

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

[NewInBoston]

Better Canva than Adobe. Affinity being a small team put us all in a more vulnerable position. This does help reinforce the walls so to speak, and before reading the entire letter I did think cloud possibilities. 
 

At the moment this could go both ways. There is now a 100% chance that small, agile companies will be bought out eventually, but Canvas has a lot to gain by NOT being Adobe, and I think they know this.

and besides, when is the last time you explored job openings and saw "must know Affinity Suite" as part of the requirements? This might change that making our favorite tool more mainstream.

[RH3]

1 hour ago, RH3 said:

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.

 

 

And as an example of Canva’s ideas of privacy see attached from their iOS app:

 

[GRH]

40 minutes ago, bures said:

I feel a caption competition coming on. First prize, a years subscription to the Canvafinity Suite, and 5000+ prizes of a Serif 'Plus' bundle.

[Sid J]

35 minutes ago, Ian Tompkins said:

This is a pretty big betrayal of our trust.

Hmm, HUGE betrayal is more like it.

[wiredfractal]

57 minutes ago, Johannes said:

Canva is a private company and has no stock market pressure

But are funded by Venture capitalist.

[NewInBoston]

6 minutes ago, jonwright said:

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

This. It all may be a moot point, in the end. Still, 800mil + offer when facing down the barrel of an AI supernova facing the industry, they would be fools to not merge. This might be the best for all of us, in the end. We just don't know it.

[Bit Disappointed]

Result:

[Sam Neil]

3 hours ago, Kiarian said:

Canva is a subscription model, as Serif inform us themselves. So much for the 'No Subscriptions' tagline. We'll be 'allowed' to keep our current version, then from the next 0.1 revision we'll be offered a discount. 

The writing is on the wall. Serif have sold out.

Out of all the companies Canva????? You might have teamed up with Adobe!

[jonheal]

18 minutes ago, jonwright said:

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

If it even takes five years ...

[Boldlinedesign]

1 hour ago, Hadriscus said:

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.

Vectorstyler is a terrific vector editing application and is not SaaS

[jonheal]

I guess time will tell how this all plays out. Maybe 10 years from now (should I live so long — which I probably won't), I'll be back to pencil and paper ... assuming pencils don't require a subscription. In which case, maybe I'll be working with hunks of charcoal on cave walls.

[Bryan Rieger]

While this announcement doesn't fill me with confidence—Serif as a company has never really filled me with confidence (Canva even less)—this announcement really does read like every other acquisition that unfortunately didn't go so well for the existing customer base.

Undoubtably with this acquisition things will change, whether that's for the better or not (and let's be honest, the current pace of development, regressions, bugs, UX/UI issues, etc with Serif isn't great) — only time will tell. I'm not optimistic, but it's day one. I'm willing to cut both Canva and Serif a little slack for the time being, and see how they both respond to all of the negative reactions, and what actions they take in the next 90 days (hell, the acquisition itself took less than 60) to demonstrate good faith on their messages and directions.

For me 'Canva' and 'professional' are words that simply do not go together well. If it really is their intention to further develop the Affinity apps into a 'professional' offering to compete directly with Adobe, then they have a very big mountain to climb.

Worst case for me is simply abandoning the Affinity apps and continuing to use the Adobe apps that I've never been able to fully shift away from after almost ten years of trying.

[nitro912gr]

There is nothing to say that is not already said from others.

I just want to add my voice that I'm not confident either of what will happen and probably should go get a universal license to keep forever now that is still available...

Funny tho, the reason that I could keep my apps forever was what got me onboard in the first place, I'm not optimistic right now that this will be the case for much longer

[henryanthony]

Glad I got in when I did. V1 is a great program, IMHO. It does everything I need it for - currently - and is pretty stable. I have found a few non-fatal bugs but have managed to work around them. V2 is too buggy for my taste. Never had any intention to upgrade. Hopefully Canva will stand by the promise to use in perpetuity. 

Thanks to all who have helped me here on the forum! 

[Caius Nocturne]

Canva is a VC-funded company, so they're not going to be running Affinity with the intention of making a product people like at a reasonable price, because I guess that's just something losers do nowadays. In other words - welcome to the Enshittification spiral.

It may take a few years, but it will get there like literally every other VC-backed product. I'm sure Serif's owners got a juicy exit though.

I have been a user of Affinity Designer for almost 10 years, and it helped me make so much that would have been really hard with FOSS and the business stability that Serif had made it wonderful and reliable because I knew that it wasn't going to have multi-tier funhouse subscriptions dropped on me or other price-gauging elements. That's gone now, so I will be treating this product and this business accordingly, with a 50 foot pole, until a stable business makes an alternative.

[ADRs]

Hear the news on the BlenderArtists forum (and read some disappointed replies), and then read the announcement...

My first impression: hmnnn, v3 most likely will be the beginning of the subscription plan, I guess the time is near to repeat the painstaking process of transitioning from Adobe to Affinity Suite, plus the period of evaluating any strong candidates to replace Affinity in my pipeline when the time comes (and hoping that replacement is not the Adobe Suite itself, although i still have my adobe enterprise subscription available to me).

I hope I'm wrong, but... well, we'll see...

[Altima Neo]

I gotta say I'm not a fan of this deal. I bought the affinity apps, V1 and V2 because they're were perfect for me as someone who like to make digital art, but not necessarily making any money from it. I liked being able to pay for an app and not worry about paying for it indefinitely.

 

I'm worried this means V3, or whatever affinity becomes after canva, will become subscription based. The very deliberately worded press release makes it clear the current system doesn't change, but offers zero reassurance for the future. I really don't like subscription models. You will have lost me as a customer if that winds up being the case.