Affinity is Free! ...But at What Cost?

For the past four years, I’ve been using Serif’s Affinity suite as my primary tools for bitmap editing, vector graphics, and publication design. I own licenses for both V1 and V2 of the software and have paid Serif a total of $324.96 CAD — a HECK of a bargain considering that for the same period of time, at their current prices, Adobe Creative Cloud would cost $4,419.48 CAD at their annual prepaid rate!¹ I think a lot of creative professionals (and amateurs) chose Affinity for these cost savings, but I was equally attracted to some of the ways it excels over Adobe’s offerings. Affinity’s 32-bit colour and OCIO support is unmatched in the vector editing space, and their non-destructive filters and effects are a big step up from Adobe’s tools. Perhaps most attractive though was the license itself, unlike Adobe’s rental model where one must pay on an ongoing basis (presumably forever) for the privilege of opening project files, Affinity’s traditional licensing model ensured that whatever you made with their suite would be yours: Openable forever… or at least until the software no longer runs on your updated machine.

Recently however, the deal has been altered. After Canva’s acquisition of Serif in 2024, the new V3 release of Affinity will be integrated into their existing offerings, and moving forward it’s going to be free! I’ve had quite a few people message me about this change knowing that I’m an Affinity user so here it is: My thoughts on the state of graphics software in 2025!

The Lead-up

On October 6th Canva announced that they’d be setting the Affinity forums to read-only and moving the community to Discord. The ability to purchase the V2 edition of the Affinity suite was also disabled and all users had to go off of was the following message on their site:

My girlfriend also uses Affinity and had recently created some social media templates in Designer for a client. She was supposed to onboard that client to the software last month, but instead of being able to set her client up with a license or trial, she had to tell her client that they were just shit out of luck until the 30th when something was supposed to happen. What a deeply unprofessional situation to be in!

I don’t know how I would have handled this better short of processing refunds for every customer that bought it that month (which is what I assume they were trying to avoid) and I can also understand wanting to avoid rug-pulling your customers who just bought the software as you discontinue the release train to offer the next version for free. Every option has tradeoffs and I’m sure this was carefully considered, but if the announcement for your software licensing change announcement personally inconveniences my partner, its hard to be stoked about it.

The Actual Announcement

Alright, so we’ve waited a month! What’s the deal!?

Well, Affinity is free now, or more accurately “freemium” — a pricing model where the core features of the software are offered for no charge with others available as paid add-ons. The paid add-ons today are (unsurprisingly for 2025) “AI” features:

• Generative fill, editing, and canvas expansion (Gen AI)
• “Super-resolution” image upscaling (ML)
• Photo colourization (ML)
• Background removal (ML)
• Portrait blur & depth-based selection tools (ML)

The term “AI” is so broadly scoped these days it’s almost meaningless. Canva has chosen to break down the complexity of the machine learning algorithms they’re using in the tooltips as “Gen AI” or “ML”. “Gen AI” features so far are processor intensive text-to-image diffusion models that run in the cloud and are presumably trained off of a vast corpus of other people’s work, while their machine learning (ML) counterparts all use less complex and finely scoped individual models that run locally on your device. All of the features in the above list are paywalled behind a $19 CAD / month Canva Pro subscription. To really hammer this point home: Machine learning models (generative models included) are simply compute processes. It is not sustainable to give users free access to cloud computing resources, but there is no reason to charge users on an ongoing basis to run models locally other than “hey, that’s our business model and its how we make money so we can keep developing software”.

Outside of these “AI” features though, the core tooling remains pretty much the same but all with the tools from all three apps integrated into one interface. There’s an image trace feature now which is nice, but still no blend tool. The new Live Glitch filter is neat and brings Affinity closer to replacing some of the things I use Nuke for today. I assume the built in Canva export feature will only get better over time and I’m excited to see what the future of that holds. Love it or hate it, lots of people use Canva’s primary product and if the company wants to try and gain some marketshare with creative professionals by offering them better ways of interfacing with their less-technical coworkers who are mostly template reliant, I’m all for it.

One day after release, Canva’s Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams released a short two minute video attempting to answer some questions people understandably had about this change. He clarified some of the terms and conditions incongruities² around using user-data to train generative models (he says they wont do that), and gave the following statement on why Affinity is now free:

So why make it free then?

Because we believe that every designer deserves access to tools that respect their craft. Because the industry needs a shift from gatekeeping to generosity. And because we’ve built a sustainable business model at Canva that allows us to support this kind of access without compromising on product quality or user trust.

This isn’t a marketing stunt, it is a long term bet on creative freedom.

Really? From gatekeeping to generosity?

Lets be very clear: Canva is a business, not a charity. While the exact acquisition price was not disclosed, Forbes Australia reported the amount to be ~$516 million CAD at the time. If I was one of Canva’s investors and watched them throw around 500 million dollars on a lark with a plan that only amounted to “being generous and giving some stuff away because we’re good guys”, they’d be getting one hell of a phone call.

Affinity’s new pricing model was announced on the final day of Adobe Max 2025³ and Canva undoubtedly bought this software to expand their value offering into more professional tools that will allow them to compete directly with Adobe. This is good! Commendable even, but to take their statement — that they’re all about generosity and love you very much — purely at face value is to be a massive chump. I find this language insulting.

If Canva actually wants to make a “shift to generosity”, they should make a Ulysses pact and open source Affinity.⁴ The second they do it I’ll sing their praises till kingdom come.

Optimism

This might just be the kick in the pants Adobe needed to spur some real competition. Affinity Designer launched in 2014 with Photo in 2015 and Publisher in 2019, and in that time Adobe has continued to dominate the market with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. While I don’t believe in his flowery language, Adams’ principal statement of “we already make our money with our core business offering” rings true to me, and I think plenty of Canva’s customers will be better served by Affinity’s tooling, especially if they continue to improve the handoff between Affinity and Canva. Their thesis of making money by continuing to sell to marketing teams and solidifying Canva’s vendor lock-in by improving the pipeline between creative and marketing seems solid to me.

I also remain hopeful that the larger pool of resources that Canva has access to can drive them closer to feature parity with other software packages. It’s a long uphill battle but they’ve been at it for a while and seem to have a really solid foundation to continue to build upon.

Pessimism

…But what happens once they become the dominant player in the market? Or leadership changes? Or a new product manager at Canva is tasked with delivering more value for Canva Pro users? Only time will tell, but I suspect any truly negative repercussions of this move will only start to surface after a few years at least. The requirement to log into Canva for what is supposed to be a free local application is ridiculous. Prompt people to do that when required to access payment-gated or collaborative features! This reeks of future enshitification plans and lets Canva shut down your access to their (currently) free software at any time on their terms. Currently the program appears to invalidate licenses if the date computer’s date is set to a year from now meaning that even if you log in today, you will need to do something (update the app, log in, etc) in a year to validate your free “license”! This seems wholly unnecessary for a truly free piece of software and is a good example of the type of risk that you adopt by using this software as it stands today.

What I think I’ll miss most in this shift is losing my license to the software. Under the previous agreement, I owned a thing! Now I no longer have the opportunity to own new versions, they are just provided to me by Canva on an ongoing basis (because they’re generous, or so I’m told). Because of this license, I get to continue to use my V2 Affinity apps until they shut down the license server which will inevitably be annoying. If Canva decides to push a final update to V2 that disables the activation requirement or adds local key-based licenses, they’d gain some goodwill here.

Future Plans

Despite all my grumbling, I’m going to keep using it! I continue to own my license for V2 and V3 changes so little that I might just keep using it until they come up with some compelling reasons for me to switch. I don’t plan on purchasing a Canva Pro subscription — I’ve found that generative AI isn’t all that useful for the visual work that I create and I’m wary of the currently untested copyright implications. All things considered, I think the future is still a pretty bright one here, but this change isn’t without its downsides.

Specifically, I’m reminded of YouTube creator EndVertex’s excellent video essay on for-profit creative software⁵ and the conclusion they arrived at. Creative software is complex: It is hard and time consuming to develop, and learning to use it is equally involved. These barriers to entry for developers and users alike create moats and disruptions in the market like this are rare.

I want an escape hatch and because Canva doesn’t seem to want my money anymore I’ve decided to give Graphite $140 CAD — the previous upgrade cost that I paid for V2 of the Affinity suite. Graphite is an open source, Rust-based 2D graphics package built with procedural workflows at its core. It’s still early days and far from ready to be my preferred design software but they’ve made great progress over the last three years and I’m excited to see their scrappy and driven team continue to knock features off their very ambitious roadmap.

May the best graphics package win!