“When we made Affinity free, some people assumed there had to be a catch. Let me be absolutely clear. There is no catch.”
I do not think this comment will age well. You don’t spend USD$1 billion on something just to give it away. It’s very likely the plan is a freemium model, because that’s what the rest of Canva is. That means gating features behind a subscription tier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9YR9KeCJDY
@marcedwards their doing/gonna do a few things… seems now you need a canva login to use it, and everything becomes input into their AI model. The future will also probably be multi-tier sub walls like figma where useful features will be only available at higher paid tiers rather than their base paid tier.
This allows them to inflate their canva user numbers/MAU, etc.
@marcedwards Yuuuuup. And folks are all ‘this is great!’ MF, you are in the year 2025. How do you NOT know how ‘free’ works outside of OSS?!
It’s like they’ve learned NOTHING.
Hah, my talentless amateur doodlings are worthless to them. I'm still coming out ahead.
It'll be a while before it gets intolerably enshittified, and in the meantime I'll have some tools I didn't previously have. But what I do with them will be rubbish with no commercial or emotional value.
@octothorpe @marcedwards The stuff you upload to the Canva account can supposedly be used to train the AI, but they’re being pretty explicit that nothing you do locally in Affinity will/can be used for that… not saying that can’t change in the future, but we *should* be able to take their word for it at least in the here and now.
@marcedwards @octothorpe Totally agree with you and it'll be interesting (terrifying) to watch this space. I desperately want them to do right by Affinity and their users but indeed, we've seen this movie before.
My only beef in this entire larger discussion has been with folk saying this slurping up of all your Affinity content for training models is happening *right now*, when it isn't 🙂
@drewpickard @marcedwards Had to buy it every 3 years or so, and for *much* more money if you needed the the more of the Adobe Suite. The pricing was also geographically wildly uneven.
It was cheaper to book a flight from Oslo, Norway to New York. Buy Adobe Creative suite and fly back to Norway. And those flight tickets weren’t cheap.
That said, the last Adobe Product I paid for was still CS6, and I completely abandoned them for personal work. (And tried to avoid them even when the work place paid.)
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