[HN Gopher] Canva's affinity strategy: Normies over power users
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Canva's affinity strategy: Normies over power users
Recent and related: _Affinity Studio now free_ -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445 (753 comments)
Author : speckx
Score : 78 points
Date : 2025-10-31 12:18 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| Related (which is linked to the actual post on the
| affinity.studio website):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445
| dang wrote:
| Thanks - we'll put that link in the toptext above.
| Zealotux wrote:
| I tried it today after struggling for hours with alternatives,
| it's much better than anything else I tried.
| gdulli wrote:
| Is it a "loss" if your users have to sign in to use your product,
| to get monetized indirectly?
| 827a wrote:
| I think their real bet (good or not) is that AI isn't going to
| need to use Afinity Studio.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| 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.
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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.
| jsmailes wrote:
| 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.
| daft_pink wrote:
| 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.
| robenkleene wrote:
| 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.
| rambambram wrote:
| 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.
| seemaze wrote:
| 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
| kakuri wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| sixtyj wrote:
| 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?
| graypegg wrote:
| > 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...
| sixtyj wrote:
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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!
| _bent wrote:
| 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
| 50EUR each (often discounted to 35EUR) has already bought it.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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.
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