Canva has made its biggest acquisition till date and acquired Affinity suite of creative software products, providing stiff competition to market leader Adobe for its creative suite.
Affinity just sent out another email. Amongst other things, this includes a pledge to continue offering a perpetual licence.
Hmm, I hope so, but the temptation will be to price in a way that disincentives buying the product and pushes people into a subscription.
I will not be subscribing if they do.
Time will tell. Anyhow, here is what they have said:
The Affinity and Canva Pledge
By the Affinity and Canva Teams
We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
Given the backlash I have seen in news comments sections, on the CEOs youtube message etc they pretty much has to add this. Companies as a rule always say nothing will change post acquisition, so largely meaningless.
Happy to keep using my purchased apps until such a point as a I need an alternative, but won’t go the subscription route either and will probably not recommend them as an (at least not without caveats) as an alternative suite going forward.
Affinity just sent out another email. Amongst other things, this includes a pledge to continue offering a perpetual licence.
Hmm, I hope so, but the temptation will be to price in a way that disincentives buying the product and pushes people into a subscription.
I will not be subscribing if they do.
Time will tell. Anyhow, here is what they have said:
The Affinity and Canva Pledge
By the Affinity and Canva Teams
We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
Given the backlash I have seen in news comments sections, on the CEOs youtube message etc they pretty much has to add this. Companies as a rule always say nothing will change post acquisition, so largely meaningless.
Happy to keep using my purchased apps until such a point as a I need an alternative, but won’t go the subscription route either and will probably not recommend them as an (at least not without caveats) as an alternative suite going forward.
Canva exists, Serif do not.