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Comment by MerrimanInd | Hacker News Reader

I understand where y'all are coming from and this is not a judgement against Canva specifically. But you can't be surprised that people are concerned after so many years of anti-consumer anti-patterns in software that start exactly like this. This has nothing to do with Canva or Serif but the industry as a whole has squandered goodwill for so many years that actions like this no longer get the benefit of the doubt.

So unfortunately due to the rug pulls of many bad actors y'all will have to explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly because damn near every other time a company has followed this trajectory it is not in the consumer's best interest.

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> explain exactly how this doesn't end poorly

Explanations aren't sufficient either. The industry has burned that bridge. Strong contractual guarantees. Ceasing personal data collection operations, etc. etc. Concrete steps only. Thus far we have one concrete step that is proof of the opposite direction.

I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.

On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.

> a macro and game-theory perspective

bro you _need_ to log off

> I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.

I actually can't but I'd welcome hearing more about the strategy. I suspect what you're alluding to is maybe an open-core model? Generate free value for the entire ecosystem and then capture a portion of it with value-adding paid features? I'd be interested in that but I don't see where the FOSS layer is here.

> I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding

I also want to do mission-driven and moral work in the tech industry but I think there may be a disconnect between how the general population sees the tech industry and how it sees itself. This is my motivation to make these comments; not to be antagonistic and unpleasant for no reason but to attempt to hold up a mirror and show the tech industry the crisis of confidence that it faces. It would be like Philip Morris - after decades of subverting science and pushing cigarettes - launching a vape and expecting to receive the benefit of the doubt that the product has no downsides. Gone are the days of Silicon Valley being the warm and cuddly companies saving the world from their beanbags and open concept offices.

> We want to prove to be the exception to the rule.

You’ll be the first. It’s an empty promise that can’t / won’t be fulfilled unless it’s a legally binding deal with compensation to users if the deal changes.

I bought v1 + v2 and, by most measures, settled for an inferior product to get a perpetual license. I won’t use the new one for “free” because it’s not. The cost is the very likely scenario of getting rug pulled in the future.

The day the v2 license server shuts down I’ll be asking for a refund.

You lay out an impossible challenge for Canva, there is no way they can prove that they will never add a subscription service or different charges in the future.

What exactly do you expect from them? Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product? That still isn't a guarantee that they wouldn't move towards more paid features and subscriptions in the future.

>> "What exactly do you expect from them?"

Nothing. No one asked for Canva. The acquisition is an imposition by a company that has not earned the trust we had in Serif.

You can only please some of the people some of the time I guess.

> Would you prefer they just kept charging you for the product?

Yes, exactly. Knowing that my interests, my consumer spending choices, are the direct feedback path to their profitability is one of the only ways to provide some concrete assurances that they'll be building for the customer's needs and not for data collection, AI shovelware, or some other play.

Did that stop Adobe moving towards a subscription model?

People complain about Adobe's subscription model but it's superior to free-to-play consumer software because it still keeps an alignment between the consumer interest and the company's income. Despite its other faults, you could even argue that a consumer subscription model can be better aligned than single purchase software because the customer needs to continually choose to pay the company for its use and it incentivizes continually improvement and competition.

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