Yes, Affinity really is free. You can use every tool in the Pixel, Vector, and Layout studios, plus all of the customization and export features, as much as you want, with no restrictions or payment needed. If you’re on a Canva premium plan, you’ll also be able to unlock Canva’s powerful AI tools within Affinity.
Oh god, how are they financing its development? Selling my personal data? Training AI on my data? Nagware? Not giving us a Linux version, ever?
The best possible scenario is that they’re just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they’ve pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they’ll alter the deal.
Considering you can turn off telemetry and never need to connect it to the internet after activation, I’m assuming that - like how Adobe uses cheap education licenses to on-ramp people onto their platform - this is largely intended to drive professionals towards Canva and their various other products. They take a loss on this product to become the de-facto standard image/vector/publishing application.
Canva’s AI features are a subscription service. Existing Affinty features are now free.
What if not enough people pay for the AI features? Will Affinity enshittify?
Also, are these features going to be littered across the UI as greyed out buttons that show a popover prompting you to get a Canvas subscription when you hover them? That’s basically ads baked into the UI.
There’s always the option to go back to being a regular paid product.
Not sure why you use future tense because the new version is out now and you can just take a look at it yourself.
It’s now an all in one UI and no longer different applications for vector graphics, photo editing, and layout. You can switch between different UIs on the fly and Canva AI is just one of those and one you can even disable:
I don’t own a Windows or Mac machine, I have no idea what the current product looks like, but I’ve been following Affinity for a while in the hopes that I can eventually buy their product with money.
Linux became so good at emulating windows apps, it now runs some of them better than windows itself (higher fps, lower power draw), so eventually their will be a port.
Given that these non native ports run in containers/bottles/whatever and internet access is often limited by default. However internet access is the key for their new business modell.
Basically Linux users will get the same or better product, without the drawbacks, which reminds me of pirated movies, where only the people actually buying it were made to sit through unskipable commercials.
Sadly Affinity Studio isn’t one of them - it runs barely, if at all in emulators and believe me we tried. Especially for larger files it’s still unusable.