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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing they are giving the core away for free to collect training data.

I think it's simpler than that. Canva's primary competitor is Adobe, and Adobe's remaining advantage is with creative professionals. That's Adobe's core market and their core revenue stream.

It's a classic "commoditize your complements" play. Canva remains profitable without charging for Affinity, but Adobe can't stay profitable if they stop charging for Photoshop/Illustrator.

The business justification works without imputing any more sinister motives than that.

I mean, 9/10ths of the dark-pattern distrustworthy bullshit businesses pull is not required to attain or maintain "profitability," it's just squeezing every dime of revenue from their customers.

I would frankly rather pay for software then be left wondering if I can trust free commercial software.

Would be really nice if we had more of the "just pay" options. As it is the "just pay" options mostly also can't be trusted any more than the free(-mium) options, and both will try their best to "squeeze every dime of revenue".

I think they're giving it away to take mindshare away from Adobe among younger creators. The rise of Capcut and similar mobile first software eventually leads to Adobe, Final Cut for video, and Davinci Resolve. This provides a ladder from Canva to Affinity under one banner at low to no cost.

They claim not to, but I am extremely suspicious.

>No, your content in Affinity is not used to train AI-powered features, or to help AI features learn and improve in other ways, such as model evaluation or quality assurance. In Affinity, your content is stored locally on your device and we don’t have access to it. If you choose to upload or export content to Canva, you remain in control of whether it can be used to train AI features — you can review and update your privacy preferences any time in your Canva settings.

I mean, be suspicious, that’s always good. But have proof before being certain of something you don’t have facts to back up.

That is why I said I'm suspicious, and did not make a claim that they are doing it. Thanks for your input.

That’s what suspicion means.

>But have proof before being certain of something you don’t have facts to back up

When it comes to such things, it's better to assume bad intent.

Assuming corporate benevolence as the default is foolish.

This is a better point than the one I made

You can opt out of the telemetry sharing

So they say, for now, for some definition of "telemetry" and "sharing", caveat caveat caveat..

Asterisks and super-text numbers, the foundation of any trusting business relationship thumbs up

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