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Comment by gotrythis | Hacker News Reader

I am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version.

This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades.

I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.

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Nothing is free.

If they can't monetize the product with ai subscriptions they sure as hell will end up monetizing their users and their content.

I suspect Canva is willing to offer Affinity for free because it holds Adobe's feet to the fire and forces them to compete on Canva's home turf: the nonprofessional design market.

There's clearly a funnel for Canva Pro upgrades, but (to my knowledge) they've never paywalled formerly-free features, and it seems to be a profitable strategy so far.

> it seems to be a profitable strategy so far

OTOH some sources report Canva paid like $400M for Affinity. Even for a company like Canva it does seem significant. They might need to adapt their strategy if the investment doesn't pan out as expected.

You have to wonder though - why in the world would they offer it for free? They must have a trick up their sleeve.

Offering it for free is likely to increase their user base significantly, which in turn will increase the number of people who end up paying for the AI features.

Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.

Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.

They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.

Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing:

  Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans

And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans:

  Are AI features available?
  Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity.

  Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan?
  No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts.

Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.

So, unless you want to use AI, which wasn't available in the previous products, you are not missing out on anything?

This is what I don’t understand. Why complain about it if the model gives you everything except the cloud service?

Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top.

If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.

It is a freemium model, but they are doing it in the proper way. I’m a bit worried this could lead to enshittification down the road, but for now I’m glad they’re doing this, will definitely give it another try, and might throw in a few bucks even. (Especially if they reconstider their stance on Linux support!)

Freemium definition: A type of business model that offers basic features of a product or service to users at no cost and charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features.

Yes, you can add on additional AI if you want it. But, the product is not at all limited in features. It is a complete product, 100% of what we were paying for before, now for free, plus new features, also free.

I would define it more like a lost-leader than freemium.

Thank you, Canva.

Right at this moment the situation is great (basically the same thing but for free!), but this does look like the beginning of a spiral of enshittification.

I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.

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