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Comment by osxman | Hacker News Reader

This is bad news... I liked the Publisher/Designer/Photo apps on my Mac. The presentation of this new 'Canva' acquired product feels like a circus, and roadmap is very unclear also. This feels like it will be the end of a none adobe solution.

Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.

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Now that the basic tools are all free, they no longer make money. AI features are the only thing that makes money, so all development is going to funneled into the AI features exclusively.

That doesn't make sense. The free part is the marketing, the more people like it, the faster it spreads. I run a freemium business and all the motivation internally is to increase growth by improving the free product. Once you achieve a good conversion to pro, any more will slow down growth. At that point, all you care about is improving the product for free users to generate word of mouth, and building features that will do so.

Hi, Canva employee & Affinity user+lover for 10+ years (pre-acquisition) here.

That’s not true. We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.

I understand this could be interpreted as ‘corporate PR’, but even from a game-theory sense, you’d want to maximize the top of your funnel, which is free users.

We don't believe you.

I've used free Canva and premium Canva on and off for years. Based on their track record, I'm keeping an open mind.

Will we still be able to use our paid license without having to connect it to a Canva account?

Why did you combine the products into one? Separately, each product was focused and capable; each product did one thing well, and integrated cleanly with the other products.

There was no need to combine them, even if you wanted to add in the AI features.

And I sure as hell can design just fine without a Canva account.

Publisher was already the combined version, kind-of. I never needed that one but it has the three personas.

I loved Affinity v1 suite's offline activation model. Sadly that changed in v2 and the same thing is happening now.

Is there any hope to enable activating v2 offline? That way I can still install and use it when you eventually shutdown the activation server.

I understand why this is important. I’ll try my best to see what we can do :) Thank you for the great feedback.

It would be great to patch the v2 apps into an "offline mode." Then you don't have to worry about maintaining the license servers.

+1, I'm still on v1, partially because it required no account, no tether to the developer to activate. Just a straightforward purchase. I give them money, they give me an activation key, and our relationship is OVER. Why companies keep insisting on complicating this with accounts and online activations, I'll never know and never agree to.

> We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible

In the lead up to this launch, for the last month, Serif products were unavailable for purchase, leaving me unable to open the document that I created while on a free-trial. It would be dumb of me to create more documents in the proprietary affinity format, because there's nothing stopping you from deciding to do some other marketing stunt that involves removing my access to open my documents in the future.

I'm advocating for open source not as "moving the goal post" but as the ONLY thing that guarantees that I have the right and ability to continue running the software on my own device.

>We really do want to make all design, including professional design, as widely accessible as possible; including those who can’t afford it.

Open source it, then.

Hello,

As a professional book designer and graphic design professor, I am sorry but I can’t rely to switch my main tools (and student guidance) over policy claim from Canva.

I totally get that inference and maintaining software is very costly. If the business model is only oriented toward AI tools, a very good proof of good faith would be to open source and provide a pay-per-use AI API. I have no doubts that a good part of the graphic design community would quickly shift to free as in free speech tools with a foreseeable future. We desperately need a Blender for DTP…

Just a reminder you can keep using your Affinity V2 apps. They run just fine on macOS 26.

The real concern… will our V2 apps run on macOS 27 or macOS 28?

I know no new features will be added to V2—what about bug fixes and security updates?

Circus? And why do you think you payed for nothing?

Looks like they unified Designer/Photo/Publisher into one app, will take a bit to to get used to, but overall nice, the split between Photo & Designer was always a bit silly I feel. Also added GenAI features, for $12/m, not in a hurry to subscribe atm, but could come in handy. Cool to see the suite is still alive and getting updates.

it's fair to be very worried about the future of the apps, but this:

> Also I paid every upgrade for NOTHING.

is ridiculous. you (and I) paid for upgrades for software we liked, and then in exchange for that money got upgrades to said software.

it's completely ridiculous for you to now whinge about this particular thing.

I can understand your confusion – possible anger - with my remark. But you take my answer too literally. I paid for it without regret, because I liked the software. But now it feels as a dead end so all those efforts for nothing... in the end it is a waste of both time investment and money. Cheers.

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