Yesterday Canva / Serif announced that Affinity will be free of charge from now on to forever.

After the marketing campaign, that created a lot of fear and speculation of the future and the subscriptions, the news has been taken in with some suspicion - although I think that the biggest majority of users have been very positively surprised.  I sympathise with those who remain skeptical. There is a sort of post traumatic stress disorder originating from everything that Adobe has done previously. They paved a way for incredibly abusive and predatorial corporate behavior that we have seen lately a lot. The fear of always getting the shorter end of the stick has been imprinted on people's mind.  We expect the worst from any larger corporation and it's difficult to adjust oneself to accept a free version just, when you have learnt to approach freebies with: "well, what's the catch?". And that is where the Affinity's marketing campaign failed a bit.

There are other strategic wins that I suspect Canva is hoping for by making Affinity free of charge and they have nothing to do with exploiting the users. Breaking Photoshop's and Illustrator's dominating power is one of them. As the new AI-features are only tied to Canva subscription, it is obvious that they consider the optional subscriptions to bring more revenue than just selling one-off software.  I think it's a strong and logical move. 

The subscription of Canva is a lot cheaper than Adobe's Creative Cloud.  Reading through how the AI is used and all the options that are available for the user relating to machine learning, it feels very user friendly and considerate. Most, if not all, AI options are off by default. I think it  just tells that instead of becoming Adobe-like predator, Canva is striking where it hurts Adobe the most.

I have had Canva account a long time. I have used it now and then but I have never experienced it pushing any forced payments like Adobe. 

I have been testing the new Affinity and so far, barring some weird crashes, it looks good. I like it - a lot. A bit of adjustment is needed because things have been moved around. But it looks sleek, the brush engine is everything I hoped to see. It's flawless. Gone are the small microsecond jabs, pauses and additional dots that irritated me in V2.

Affinity 1 and 2 have been my most beloved asset for years. But because of the brush engine I've had to rely on so many other software making it really difficult to concentrate on just one workflow - which has been destructive. I have a feeling that this is it now . I choose to rely on what they have said, about it being free forever, and Affinity.