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Comment by tecleandor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!)

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