Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

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I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.

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.

It’s free for now. The log in and activation means they can change that any time. I’d rather pay for v3, v4, etc. than being held hostage with a login requirement.

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.

My understanding is that you need an account and Internet for the download and license activation, but then works offline (they specifically say “for extended periods”) in the FAQ. That is pretty much the same as v2 right?

They ought to follow the intellij/jetbrain model, where you pay for the subscription to access the latest version, but when you stop paying, you can keep using the last version you've paid a subscription for.

But of course, this does not hold your data hostage, and thus less "profitable" in the long run.

Since Affinity saves your files to local disk, no one can hold them "hostage." And it reads and writes standard filetypes, including PSD (Photoshop).

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