Welcome to Canva, Affinity | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Canva, Affinity

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36 pointstagawa17 comments

Interesting. Affinity has a big following of people who want Adobe clones without paying a subscription fee, and Canva can certainly boost their growth to take over more of the market.

On the other hand... can Affinity's "no subscription" model really remain intact after an acquisition like this? Canva might want to make big changes to increase profits, since they need to make back the money they spent purchasing it.

I think it's unfair to dismiss Affinity's products as Adobe clones. They do their own thing within the conventions expected of modern graphic design apps.

I can't say much about the vector app or the print design app, but the photo editor is definitely a Photoshop clone. Not that it's a bad thing! Photoshop has a great workflow, and to clone it is a smart choice that makes for good software.

Great. Now, please listen carefully. Do not fuck up Affinity. It’s absolutely fantastic software with a great purchasing model. Do NOT turn this into a subscription. For the love of god.

Affinity as we know it is already dead. Canva is all about profit. Subscription model will be most likely be introduced in the next major version.

Is it a "great" purchasing model because it's cheap for you, or why?

You can buy it and keep using it, no strings attached. No monthly payments or artificial restrictions.

I'm aware. I was just trying to challenge the mantra of saas=bad because one-time payments are just cheaper for the user. Because the other side of the coin is that it's less money for the dev. So it's not that easy if you look at the whole picture.

They did well so far. It's healthy to challenge the idea that things need to keep expanding forever.

Another great project like that is http://reaper.fm/ and I hope they'll never move from the "pay once for current and current+1 version" which is both providing future income and is not a subscription.

I did actually buy reaper. And I like it because it's not expensive. But I would have probably paid for a subscription, and kept it far too long, making them more money.

I like the idealistic "not all things need to grow" mindset, just wanted to shine a light that most things don't work that way.

> I was just trying to challenge the mantra of saas=bad because one-time payments are just cheaper for the user.

You hit the nail on the head. Affinity isn’t a SaaS service. It’s a licensed software product sold by major version.

Although the corporate world seems to have left the product/service distinction behind, most _people_ haven’t (and accountants certainly haven’t).

Because I pay once, and I own it. For life.

I don’t care if it’s 50 bucks or 500. I don’t want to pay for your shitty subscriptions. I do not want to have an account, I do not want to have to have an internet connection just to use software that I paid for.

From Affinity's site[1]:

>Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold? > >There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!

I guess the keywords are “at this time”.

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-statem...

There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time...

...but since there's nothing stopping us, we will definitely do it later once the publicity of the acquisition has died down. Like, next year probably.

The wording virtually guarantees that it’s changing to subscription. I give it a year and a half.

[dupe]

Merge with other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39824191

Oh no no no no shit no

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