Licensing - a barrier to being truly cross-platform

[garywood84]

I posted this in the announcement thread for the Affinity Designer Windows launch, but that's become a very long thread so my question got lost before it was answered. I'm separating it out, to make it more visible:

 

Has any progress been made on the licensing issues that are currently preventing Affinity Designer from being truly cross-platform? If one licence can be installed on two machines, it needs to be possible for one of those to be a Mac and the other a Windows PC.

 

I know that there was discussion of this in the old Serif forums, and at that stage, the intention was that anyone wanting to use the software on a PC and Mac would need to buy two copies. That's not how licensing works for most other software that's available on two platforms (think Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud), and -- for me at least -- is a barrier to switching to Affinity.

[R C-R]

True, it is not how it works with some other software, but consider what they cost vs. what a pair of Affinity licenses costs. In practical terms, which is the real barrier for most users?

[RNKLN]

Yes, the cross platform license only costs you $100. Install on unlimited Macs you own and i don't know how many Windows machines. Quite a bargain. And how many people really run something like this both on Mac and Windows?

[TonyB]

I posted this in the announcement thread for the Affinity Designer Windows launch, but that's become a very long thread so my question got lost before it was answered. I'm separating it out, to make it more visible:

 

 

Office for Mac is actually a difference licence on Mac and Windows and has been for years. Only Office 365 has a licence for both but is subscription only. I do agree if we went subscription we should look at a universal licence as it does make sense. We don't have any plans to go subscription at the moment as most users seem to not like them.

 

The issue is complex as for purchases made on the Mac App Store we don't get any information so causes barriers for us. In the end we decided to make the price point low enough to hopefully mitigate any adoption issues.

 

With volume licences we should be able to offer more flexibility and we will look at introducing them early next year.

[forelimbs]

One license across both platforms would be great! I use both Windows and macOS for work, and switch between frequently. 

 

Just to provide an example of how another company / application approached this problem: 

 

I purchased the excellent 1password software by AgileBits from the Mac App Store. Their policy at the time was to give a 50% discount code for a Windows license if you emailed customer support and attached a copy of your Mac App Store receipt. I took advantage of this policy, and appreciated the discount.