Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else.

As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.

A mistake, if you ask me. They can't compete with Adobe.

Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all.

I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.

It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).

Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions.

Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.

Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.

The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1]

That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.

[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/

Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal.

I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.

Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.

Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.

Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.

Well, I’m glad I have my standalone license. I guess I’ll be on Designer V2 for the next 10 years like I was with Illustrator CS3.

(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher)

They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.

This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/

I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.

I've never seen much hate for Canva until this thread.

HN will really hate on any kind of acquisition, regardless of if the acquirer is a "big bad" like Adobe or not.

Official statement from Affinity (Serif):

https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/canva-statement...

   Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
   There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!

If Adobe would have a little bit of brain left, they would offer a cheaper subscription now. Essentially covering Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Instead of only the reasonably priced PS/LR bundle versus the too expensive "all the products we ever had" bundle.

They could basically wipe out Affinity. But yeah, won't happen I guess...

In light of this, I can't help but feel the OSS alternatives to the Adobe graphics suite are pretty abysmal.

Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.

GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.

As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.

From the forum, on the topic of the buyout:

"[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash

So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-aff...

I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version of Flex)... to cut a long story short - gave me shall we say - a few resentments towards the company. I suppose it's time to consider Pixelmator now, I'm such a grey-beard... subscriptions suck. ;-)

This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration.

Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?

If they move Affinity to subscription, CorelDRAW is probably the only viable (commercial) graphic product left with a perpetual license. Apart from FOSS, of course.

There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.

I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.

That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.

I love Affinity and I don't love Canva. I'm hopeful nothing much changes but I'm not holding my breath. I'll pay a subscription over my dead body.

It’s a matter of time before Adobe buys them and kills everything

I love Affinity Designer as a tool and his pay once license, I'm pretty sure that if you already purchased current version (V2), you will be fine, but I'm afraid they will go the subscription route soon like Adobe and Canva.

Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that.

A lesson is that with the good ol Inkscape that type of thing that endangered the tool it doesn't happen.

As per the article, do people really see Canva as a competitor to Adobe? I must be missing something.

I wonder in these type of takeovers, when it seems clear that nothing good can come next for the product users, if it would be somehow possible for a cooperative style takeover by the customer base.

Canva seems lost in terms of what they are or want to be. I suppose AI doesn't help businesses like Canva's.

There goes the last lingering thread of my non-Linux OS use.

... and let the enshittification begin!

now they just need to train generative AI models by opting in all of their users to allow training in on their data and forcing them to opt-out if they want otherwise. To compete with adobe that is.

Canva wants to be the next Adobe

Acquire figma next.

Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.

They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.

To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.

[1]: https://www.slidescarnival.com/

Maybe I'm naive but I'm not so sure Affinity will automatically end up as a subscription-based app like Canva Pro and Creative Cloud. Subscription makes sense for Canva Pro where a lot of the value add is in additional elements and templates and there's not a versioned app you can buy with a certain set of features. For a tool where you release discrete versions with new features it's a lot easier to just sell it as one-off purchases.

Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...

This is deeply saddening news. I own Affinity Photo and Designer and I'm sure in a few years people won't be able to say that. For most of my usage, mind you, Krita and Inkscape have been able to meet my needs, so more than likely this will just solidify my preference for the open source options out there.

I'm a happy Affinity Customer thanks to their low cost perpetual licenses and quality software, hoping that none of that changes - don't use it nearly enough to justify maintaining a subscription.

With the advent of generative AI the painting has been on the wall for some time. Using it in Photoshop is simply so good that it is a necessity by now. Affinity are not a large enough company to train an AI, and any AI will not be able to run locally for a long time. So it must take place in the cloud and therefore require a subscription.

Ah great. More fucking enshittification. What a disaster.

Yet another UK business in tech with great potential now gone. It just seems UK cant grow any big tech company. Even ignoring Tech, most if not all of the big UK companies are in Finances and Services.

I love their software and am happy for the humans behind it all. As a customer who doesn’t believe they won’t force a subscription on me, I wish I had never supported them

It's bad news and not because of the "fear of subscription" (if you think you aren't paying for a subscription now, you are deluding yourself).

The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).

Welp, as if Affinity didn't already have problems...

Also, this. https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/15707285663500206...

Sad news! I've been an Affinity customer for many years; I like it much better than Adobe. Canvas branding is underwhelming, and there is no doubt in my mind that Affinity will change to be at the level of what Canvas represents: a web app.

What a shame. So far akamais purchase of linode haven’t bourne ill fruit. Time will tell

I don't know, products rarely get better with these acquisitions. I like my native app Affinity Designer, with a reasonable one time license very much as is.

I began migrating stuff away as soon as I got their email announcement today.

I have this horrible feeling that they're going to convert the Affinity suite to be online-only products.

I think one thing most people are missing: because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.

Think about it: why would Canva essentially destroy the reason why so many users (around 3 million according to the reporting) went to Affinity in the first place by going to a subscription model? I don't see that happening.

Canva is clear they want a foothold in the professional design market and buying Affinity and its team is the quickest way to get there.

I paid for V1 of the Affinity suite and happily paid for the universal V2 license upgrade which enabled me to run their apps on my iPad and my Mac and even Windows if I ever needed that. It was a bargain.

Ironically, I just removed the last remnants of Creative Cloud last week. I hadn't been using it, but it was there "just in case…".

Unlike when Adobe tried to buy Figma, I'm more optimistic than most that this going to turn out well for existing Affinity users.

I'd have no problem with being able to roundtrip designs between Affinity and Canva seamlessly. Someone could start on Canva and one a project progressed to a certain point, they could seamlessly transition to Affinity. Depending on what you're doing, you can quickly reach Canva's limits and it should be trivial to pickup where you left on in a future version of Affinity Designer or Photo.

Other than being able to configure DropBox, there's no cloud syncing support built-in to Affinity. Sure, you can glue it together with iCloud, OneBox, etc. but that's not what users should have to do in 2024.

I'm no stranger to bad outcomes from botched and user-hostile mergers and acquisitions of software. But this one has all of the potential to go the right way and I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.

It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.

I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".

I hope that I'm wrong.

Canva is subscription based.

Canva's approach has been to create a convoluted, frankenstein's monster, browser-first, mixed media editor that is largely inadequate for professional workflows. Also everything is locked away in their cloud from files to assets. I hate everything about Canva's UX and performance.

I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.

Sad day...

The fast race toward version 3 has been a cause for concern. It _just_ came out and it's already in the 2.4s.

Oh no!