Canva’s affinity strategy: Normies over power users
tedium.coRecent and related: Affinity Studio now free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445 (753 comments)
Recent and related: Affinity Studio now free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445 (753 comments)
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).
This is analysis is spot on.
I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...:
> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.
Regarding this, I'm curious how big this market is really. E.g., for me, working on software, I almost never see design work from folks that aren't professional designers (and if I do, they use Figma already, not the Creative Suite). But I'd be curious to hear other folks impressions, even just anecdotally:
> To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.
I disagree with the comparison to / characterization of “office suite software”. At least the desktop class of office suites have a lot of power features and power users.
It’s not that power users aren’t a market, it’s that casual users are now the larger market and cheaper to serve, and software companies have been catching on to that, to the detriment of power users.
Do you mind getting more specific about what you disagree with around the comparison / characterization of "office suite software"? I can't tell what you're disagreeing with. E.g., it sounds like you're saying I don't think office suite software is powerful, which I don't think I said? (And I don't believe, e.g., I think Excel is one of the most powerful applications there is). I do think the most popular web-based office suite software (e.g., the Google suite) is less powerful than the more desktop-orientated competitors (there's an obvious reason for this, web-based software facilitates collaboration, and complex features hinder collaboration, so they're in natural opposition).
But I definitely struggle with the comparison between power users and casual users. Like I wouldn't characterize designers that use Figma as casual users, it's that the needs of software designers have changed so much, and those changes mean treating design software more like office suite software make sense.
I guess the comparison of casual users and power users is more apt when comparing the Adobe suite and Affinity suite. And, e.g., Final Cut Pro X and CapCut are evidence of a wider industry trend towards serving that market. I wouldn't necessarily say that's to the detriment of power users though, it seems like there's software to serve both markets now?
The article is about how software is changing to target casual “normies” over power users. You agreed with this take and likened it to how software is becoming more like office suites. From this I inferred that you don’t think that office suites are catering to power users.
So I don’t understand what properties of office suites you are alluding to here. Or is your point that the previously desktop-only software suites now have web-based counterparts, and the latter aren’t catering to power users anymore?
> Or is your point that the previously desktop-only software suites now have web-based counterparts, and the latter aren’t catering to power users anymore?
Yes this. More specifically collaborative software (e.g., with features like live-collaborative editing) tend to be less capable than non-collaborative software.
These are not 1-for-1 comparisons though (Figma vs. Canva), I didn't mean to imply they were. E.g., Canva isn't emphasizing collaboration. But office suite software does also have a lower barrier of entry than creative software, which I think Canva's strategy should probably capitalize on. E.g., the market has already been split for pro vs prosumer/casual, I think Canva strategy will probably be to emphasize this split short term, which would mean focusing on ease of use at the expense of complex features (and then consider the more technically complicated led shift to collaborative web-based versions later, leveraging what they've learned so far).
I don't agree.
What made Figma successful was being able to share via a URL. Period.
No program version problems. No file extension problems. No problems between Mac and Windows. No problems with anti-virus blocking your email attachment. etc.
Figma exists because sharing a bloody file between computers is still a clusterfsck in 2025.
I'm not sure what part of this you think I'd disagree with, if just looking at the microcosm of Sketch to Figma. In other words, the ease of sharing and collaborating via a URL I think is the underlying reason office suite software has become successful.
But I suspect you're arguing against the wider arch of the point I'm making (that design no longer requiring as sophisticated features helped facilitate the transition to the web-based software). If I have that right, I suggest making sure that your hypothesis about motivations behind the market transitions also incorporates the transition from Photoshop to Sketch. Because that transition (which preceded the transition to Figma) made every problem you're describing worse. Which means for example that you can't attribute the transition from Photoshop to Sketch to Figma just to the URL.
That was and is also possible in Sketch.
What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints which were an afterthought on Sketch and required third party extensions.
A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock.
For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome.
What comes first from Adobe? Pro products for free? Or attempt to acquire Canva?
> Or attempt to acquire Canva?
I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies...
I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed!
[0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2023/adobe-and-figm...
Yeah, fingers crossed is what we need.
Adobe wanted to acquire Figma for 20B, and Canva is 4.4 times bigger in revenue…
If allowed it would be a huge acquisition.
Adobe likely doesn't have the market cap to acquire Canva, unless I'm missing something in understanding M&A.
Canva is now north of $65B and growing at 100% YoY. Adobe's market cap is $142B, and with every month, Canva is chipping away at Adobe's value.
Can Adobe give up 40% of the company to acquire Canva, and would Canva even want that?
Mel, Cliff, and Cam continue to amaze me!
Yes, Canva is amazing. Except the AI that sort of sucks but it is a must in this AI bubble.
In Adobe they have to decide quickly how to deal with it. Canva is a real business competitor for them. Theoretically, some kind of joint venture could be set up.
Money, I mean a lot of money, often breaks a lot of people we think are cool. See Skype, LinkedIn, Zappos, Minecraft or even Affinity. Almost everyone has a limit. The only exception is perhaps curl or vlc player that I can remember off the top of my head.
I tried it today after struggling for hours with alternatives, it's much better than anything else I tried.
This has always been Melanie Perkin's vision for Canva. She was just SO far ahead of where everyone else was thinking.
She's always been about giving the power to normies for 90% of the work, and AI is making that more accessible than ever.
Because normies, like myself, are using Canva at work, professional designers may be used for the high-end stuff or templates, but then it gets imported into Canva so the normies can do what us normies need to do with it.
I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.
Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.
Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.
PDF expert is good enough.
Even worse is inability to use licensed Adobe suite without internet. Beeing in field and edit your work is not possible after a week.
The original Affinity business plan included selling assets like brushes, textures, LUTs via their store. I guess this wasn't wildly successful and at some point every single person that would be interested in a professional grade design suite for 50€ each (often discounted to 35€) has already bought it.
GIMP is still free. I made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Never missed it for photo editing, creating logo's and other images, or designing large prints.
I've used Photoshop forever, mostly for image manipulation instead of full on graphic production. I've found the web editor Photopea[0] to scratch most of the itch these days.
[0]https://www.photopea.com
I've been trying to use GIMP for years (since Corel destroyed Pain Shop Pro). I don't do a lot of photo manipulation so I don't put in a lot of time learning. PSP had a UI that was discoverable for an amateur occasional user. GIMP has a UI that is completely inscrutable. +1 for Photopea, it has become my go-to.
GIMP doesn't do 1% of what this does even if you don't have a problem with GIMP's UX. It's not comparable.
This. GIMP is a fine casual image processing tool. Its great in what it does. But you can't begin to compare it with Affinity or Photoshop.
I am not familiar with either, but am curious to know about their differences and intended workflows. Could you elaborate on your comment if time permits.
What can I not do with GIMP that I can do with the other software?
You can eventually do anything they can do with GIMP. It just takes a lot more time and effort and the results are less flexible. I say this as someone who tried to do it all in GIMP for many years before moving on to Affinity's software. It's the wrong tool for most of it because it's a raster graphics editor. No amount of better UX could address that. It doesn't have the tools.
Related (which is linked to the actual post on the affinity.studio website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445
Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext above.
I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn’t going to need to use Afinity Studio.
well, canva is for the normies. and it shouldn't be a surprise that their other tool would be the same.
I've been using and loving the Affinity v2 suite for the last 3 years or so, and will continue to use v2 of the suite for the time being. I know how it works, I know it won't change drastically, and it already does all the things I need it to. I know new users won't have the luxury of staying behind on the old version, but it seems wise to give them a year or two to get some legs and see if they'll stand behind this "base product free" strategy, or if they'll start locking more features behind a paywall if it doesn't make money quickly enough.
I use Pixelmator Pro, which can be bought on the AppStore. If you want to buy directly from the company, there’s Acorn from Flying Meat.
I tried to use Affinity Studio the other day and it wouldn’t allow me to register for “security reasons”. After switching browser and being able to create an account, the login handover from app -> browser -> app is failing.
Instead of user and password they use e-mail plus one-time code. The app opens the browser instead of allowing log-in natively.
I am a paying Sarif customer and I don’t intend to pay for the new version. It’s painfully obvious that I would have no control over the software I buy any more.
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Affinity, DaVinci Resolve are not free software.
Actually good free software (Blender, Krita, Musescore, Audacity...) shows the FOSS community has been improving software for decades decades.
IMO FOSS "lost the plot" when we accepted the false argument that source code sharing was purely an engineering issue rather than an ethics issue.
FWIW, it's not hard to argue that copyrighted code lost the plot at the exact same spot. It's not only FOSS' fault.
Can you explain what you mean? As far as I'm aware, ethics has always been the central issue?
ESR was pretty clear about their stance on it in this interview:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_246jsp/
Personally, I think the argument that "open source is a better way to engineer software" has largely proven to be untrue and FOSS' only advantage has been in protecting the rights of end users (who may also be developers).
DaVinci Resolve is on Linux and so are a lot of good free software like Krita, Blender etc.
Jumped the plot on that - you're right.
On the other hand, Blender hardly operates like the average FOSS community in any way, shape, or form. Calling it a victory for FOSS methods when it's mostly SV-funded and has a heavily dictated direction is like calling Android a Linux victory.
If you’re going to start throwing qualifiers out there it dilutes your point.
FOSS advocate organizations like GNU specifically claim that open source and commercial sales are compatible. The important part is software freedom, where you can access source and modify it to your own needs and redistribute with a permissive license.
It doesn’t really matter that Blender has an opinionated roadmap or that it’s funded in a certain way. The bottom line is that you can obtain, modify, and redistribute the code in a free and open source way.
It doesn’t matter that Firefox has a bunch of branding to remove and pushes VPN subscriptions and such. The code is open source so you can fork it and redistribute so long as you remove branding.
Even if you have qualms with VSCode, it’s still FOSS. The only bit that’s limiting is the Microsoft extension ecosystem. But the underlying code is all free and available and is the basis for multiple popular forks. A large portion of it still represents a FOSS success.
If I buy an enterprise version of Grafana the fact that the community version is the basis of the application is a major benefit to me compared to buying a proprietary solution like Datadog. I can potentially contribute my own enhancements and fixes, I can inspect a large portion of the source code if I have a bug or question about how the application is intended to work, etc.
Long story short, FOSS has room for commercial interests, and is superior to the alternative of lack of source code.
I'm not a FOSS advocate, but I think that's a bit strong. I think it's more a case that they recognized the need for a good user experience, but that never hit a threshold which would move the needle for change to happen with the most popular FOSS. Darktable is probably one of the exceptions here.
I really like Darktable, and it's my go to photo editor, but the user interface really isn't intuitive on first look compared to something like Lightroom. The design choice that editing modules should be ordered by their place in the pixel pipeline is logical and sometimes useful, but it ends up with a lot of the controls being in rather weird places. The customisable quick controls palette would help, if it weren't that simple things like cropping can't be added to it (at least, last time I investigated this - perhaps it's changed now?)
I could have been clearer. I wouldn't say it's the paragon of photo editing, but it's further along in terms of usability. I've seen some normal people who don't want to pay the Adobe tax move to it.
An investigation of FOSS development would highlight a bunch of problems that exist to a lesser extent with other software development. When money is on the table and there is no motivation to keep supporting behaviors that particular contributors favor then feedback shift things. When you're building stuff for "yourself" then that feedback doesn't land the same even if the project owner has aspirations for better UX.
Darktable, to me, and multiple YouTubers who have looked at it...
... falls flat on it's face in the first impression by looking like an unresponsive window, due to the disorientingly light gray color design choices. I also just tried it and of course it's not notarized, meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone to install on macOS, unless they know of the secret button in System Settings. Nope, they aren't there yet.
> I also just tried it and of course it's not notarized, meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone to install on macOS, unless they know of the secret button in System Settings.
I don't understand why you're blaming the Darktable team for that when it's Apple that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to install a program written by someone who doesn't pay them $100/year.
There's no shortage of "actually good free software" that is FOSS, so idk what you're on about
Blender comes to mind...
Atleast for the photo/image editing part, GIMP is FOSS and, while it definitely has a learning curve compared to some other software, does a pretty reasonable job
GIMP is a perfect example of how the plot has been lost.
Go to the download page: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ - A mac user has FOUR equal priority download buttons to decide between, depending on chips and whether you want direct or torrent downloads. That is an absurd decision to put in front of 99% of computer users.
For power users, no problem. But if the objective was ever to be mainstream, this is among the reasons why it isn't. There is just not enough focus on making it easy.
Sounds like an apple issue, there's only three for windows, one being the MS store and most people are used to the idea of app stores thanks to phones.
(I agree it's probably best to deemphasise the bittorrent button though)
It's a website UX issue. If it were an apple issue, every website for apple software would have this problem, and they don't.
Anyway, three equal priority options for Windows is also very bad, from a UX standpoint. Two is bad! The point is that there should be a recommendation. Unless it's fine to send many users away confused, in which case no problem!
i honestly don't care if someone gets scared away by too many buttons. might be better for them since GIMP contains a lot more confusing buttons.
photo-editing software will never be mainstream. I expect a person that works with media to be capable of picking the right download.
Photo-editing software is mainstream, except it's done by non-professionsls on phones.
Or the phone just does "good enough" processing on its own without the user having to do anything else.
I personally use Lightroom and have Photoshop as part of the same subscription but rarely use it. (And Lightroom can do most of what I need without a lot of intervention other than some cropping on my part.)
GIMP has been in development since 1996, and still can't handle basic features like CMYK; meaning any attempt to reproduce colors on a professional printer is doomed. We're not even talking Pantone yet.
People whined about CMYK until it became irrelevant (print died). I'd argue that GIMP was forward-looking by being digital-first.
The reality is all those GIMP haters can either get over it or enjoy paying increasingly high subscription fees for their increasingly enshittified creative suite subscription.
Well it has non-destructive editing finally this year, for all the claims that it was powerful that I had heard through the years, without it the Gimp was a wimp
I may have to give it a go, is drawing a rectangle still a transformation done on a rectangular selection?
So because I need professional print features, I’m a GIMP hater?
It’s fine if you don’t want GIMP to change to meet the needs of a different group (after all these years I suppose the GIMP team agrees). But to people who want to be paid for their product, this is valuable feedback.
Is Adobe responsive to their customers? Maybe at one point a long time ago. But this just shows the folly of tying your professional life to proprietary tool chains. Adobe's business now is to suck any blood left in their customers's veins while trying to obsolete them through AI intellectual property theft.
Adobe sucks, but I need CMYK to make “dead” print projects, so I got the Affinity suite.
Open source principles are nice but unlike Affinity, GIMP was not made with graphics professionals in mind. I don’t love proprietary formats but it doesn’t matter as much for print projects which have a lifespan and revenue.
People are mourning Affinity because it was a great functional tool with no strings attached. We’ve seen this story before. It’s fine; someone else will step in with an alternative when necessary.
Affinity runs fine with wine and resolve is native as are a plethora of others from comp/vfx/CGI to daws. It seems like you lost the plot...
It's almost always the case with the old-school gnu mindset, aka gimp. There are exceptions though, like blender and gnome.
Not FOSS, the OSS community. Very different breed.
I don’t follow. Some of the most popular, highest quality software out there is FOSS. The FOSS community never claimed that FOSS software on Linux would become more popular than free commercial software on Windows.
Is it a "loss" if your users have to sign in to use your product, to get monetized indirectly?