Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
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Recent and related: Affinity Studio now free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445 (753 comments)
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This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
The login and activation is a clawback option.
But of course, this does not hold your data hostage, and thus less "profitable" in the long run.
I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:
> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.
What made Figma successful was being able to share via a URL. Period.
No program version problems. No file extension problems. No problems between Mac and Windows. No problems with anti-virus blocking your email attachment. etc.
Figma exists because sharing a bloody file between computers is still a clusterfsck in 2025.
But I suspect you're arguing against the wider arch of the point I'm making (that design no longer requiring as sophisticated features helped facilitate the transition to the web-based software). If I have that right, I suggest making sure that your hypothesis about motivations behind the market transitions also incorporates the transition from Photoshop to Sketch. Because that transition (which preceded the transition to Figma) made every problem you're describing worse. Which means for example that you can't attribute the transition from Photoshop to Sketch to Figma just to the URL.
What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints which were an afterthought on Sketch and required third party extensions.
It’s not that power users aren’t a market, it’s that casual users are now the larger market and cheaper to serve, and software companies have been catching on to that, to the detriment of power users.
But I definitely struggle with the comparison between power users and casual users. Like I wouldn't characterize designers that use Figma as casual users, it's that the needs of software designers have changed so much, and those changes mean treating design software more like office suite software make sense.
I guess the comparison of casual users and power users is more apt when comparing the Adobe suite and Affinity suite. And, e.g., Final Cut Pro X and CapCut are evidence of a wider industry trend towards serving that market. I wouldn't necessarily say that's to the detriment of power users though, it seems like there's software to serve both markets now?
So I don’t understand what properties of office suites you are alluding to here. Or is your point that the previously desktop-only software suites now have web-based counterparts, and the latter aren’t catering to power users anymore?
Yes this. More specifically collaborative software (e.g., with features like live-collaborative editing) tend to be less capable than non-collaborative software.
These are not 1-for-1 comparisons though (Figma vs. Canva), I didn't mean to imply they were. E.g., Canva isn't emphasizing collaboration. But office suite software does also have a lower barrier of entry than creative software, which I think Canva's strategy should probably capitalize on. E.g., the market has already been split for pro vs prosumer/casual, I think Canva strategy will probably be to emphasize this split short term, which would mean focusing on ease of use at the expense of complex features (and then consider the more technically complicated led shift to collaborative web-based versions later, leveraging what they've learned so far).
For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome.
What comes first from Adobe? Pro products for free? Or attempt to acquire Canva?
I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies...
I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed!
[0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/adobe-and-figm...
Adobe wanted to acquire Figma for 20B, and Canva is 4.4 times bigger in revenue…
If allowed it would be a huge acquisition.
Canva is now north of $65B and growing at 100% YoY. Adobe's market cap is $142B, and with every month, Canva is chipping away at Adobe's value.
Can Adobe give up 40% of the company to acquire Canva, and would Canva even want that?
Mel, Cliff, and Cam continue to amaze me!
In Adobe they have to decide quickly how to deal with it. Canva is a real business competitor for them. Theoretically, some kind of joint venture could be set up.
Money, I mean a lot of money, often breaks a lot of people we think are cool. See Skype, LinkedIn, Zappos, Minecraft or even Affinity. Almost everyone has a limit. The only exception is perhaps curl or vlc player that I can remember off the top of my head.
She's always been about giving the power to normies for 90% of the work, and AI is making that more accessible than ever.
Because normies, like myself, are using Canva at work, professional designers may be used for the high-end stuff or templates, but then it gets imported into Canva so the normies can do what us normies need to do with it.
I tried to use Affinity Studio the other day and it wouldn’t allow me to register for “security reasons”. After switching browser and being able to create an account, the login handover from app -> browser -> app is failing.
Instead of user and password they use e-mail plus one-time code. The app opens the browser instead of allowing log-in natively.
I am a paying Sarif customer and I don’t intend to pay for the new version. It’s painfully obvious that I would have no control over the software I buy any more.
Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.
Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.
PDF expert is good enough.