When licenses MEAN nothing I PAY for nothing yarrrr
Do what you want cuz a pirate is free
You are a pirate! Yar har fiddle dee dee! Being a pirate is alright with me!
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
yo ho ho a pirate life for me!
Is there a way to pirate a service like Canva besides pirating someone’s credit card first?
I don’t funny know what canva is so… I don’t know
An easy WYSIWYG content creator for making flyers & posters. Question stands for any cloud-hosted, paywalled service.
Far as I know, you can’t pirate Google Maps or OpenAI services (API key required), for other examples. Or YouTube Premium or Spotify (albeit you can adblock the free versions).
As more programs move to the cloud, I’m imagining piracy getting much more difficult if not essentially impossible.
To the people in this thread saying “don’t buy lifetime”, how is that any different than a perpetual license? Your alternative is subscription based… I’d definitely prefer perpetual to subscription.
Software companies don’t want you to know this, but the open-source licenses on the internet are free. You can just take them home. I have 458 apps.
Rookie numbers, I have 307336924 cloned repos
There is always another way
🏴☠️
Yeah but for software you want it to work and sometimes need help, when you steal that software you are often on your own. In open source, there is nearly always an open alternative that comes with community support!
I mean, the only time I’ve used official support for some software was when I was having a license issue with Windows. Everything else has been solvable using the open internet.
The reason why I don’t pirate software anymore is you have no idea if the people who cracked it added malware or not and it’s, IMO, a perfect way to deliver malware.
Fair point, that is my fear too. I run Ubuntu so nearly all my software is open source already and for the slim number of tools that aren’t in just pay for them because they are good enough to warrant it imo.
I abuse free trial and surprisingly it works really well
Most of the time, the tools I use to pirate are open source themselves so that isn’t really a problem for me.
I don’t mean the distribution tools like bittorrent etc have malware. If you pirate games or software, you run binaries provided by the people that cracked it, which don’t tend to be open source. At least they weren’t back when I was consuming them.
I mean I used tools like UltimMC to get around having to make a minecraft account. UltimMC doesn’t provide the games themselves, that is downloaded from mojang’s website, UltimMC simply provides a way to get around basic DRM.
But they were all decieved, for another license was made. Forged in secret.
The only time I ever fell for a “lifetime” software purchase was back when Trillian (the IM client) was popular. That lasted less than 5 years. Then they released “Astas”, which was just a UI refresh, but they treated it like it was a whole new company and product. “Lifetime” is always a scam.
I’m enjoying my Plex one and Nexus Mods. The latter one was in 2013 and cost me $40. Today the yearly subscription is $70.
I got a Plex lifetime sub back in the day. They never got rid of it, but they did enshittify the product out from under me.
Jellyfin 💪🏻
I tried it, but not only does the experience not feel nearly as polished, the performance is much worse than Plex in my experience.
Similar.
And no Plexamp.
Im using Jellyfin now. It’s great, but it doesn’t have the same support across platforms. It was nice to have a native Plex app on the TV, Xbox, etc. I’m now just switching to Chromecasts on the TVs and teaching my wife to use the app for everything.
Same here, although I’m still using it. It’s doing what I got it for and some of the additions are welcome (I use live TV fairly often and some friends and I are sharing libraries) but I have been concerned. What made you switch and did you find something better?
I still actively use Plex, but I’ve been trying Jellyfin. It’s almost there but still has some work to do to catch up to Plex fully. However, its wonderfully free from bloat. I can’t stand all the crap they’ve added to Plex. Especially when I search for content that’s IN MY LIBRARY and the result it sends me to is a streaming service I don’t even have. 😡
Yeah, I have never really used search for that same reason, I don’t have enough to lose track of anyway.
Thanks for the reply though. I hear about jellyfin a lot and my needs are simple so I’m gonna give it a go.
I still find myself using Plex for its native DVR functions. NextDVR alway seemed a little bit buggier, after finally getting an IPTV source working in Plex I went back (at least for DVR stuff).
Edit: forgot to add, Plexamp and the way Plex does its sonic analysis is worth the lifetime subscription cost to me.
Plex is such ass
Yep. I bought Plex pass lifetime for $60 a while back. It came with plexamp which allowed me stream music to my phone.
Which after Google play music was murdered I vowed never to do a streaming service again.
So that was worth it.
Say what you want about the direction Plex is going currently… But as of now it 100% meets my needs.
Plexamp is amazing.
Scooping up a lifetime sub to Nexus, back when they were still available, might have been one of my best online moves. If a game can be modded, I will be modding it - I get SO much value from that one-time investment.
Facts
Something about paying for mods seems so wrong to me
You’re not paying for mods though, you’re paying for faster downloads and no ads.
Also you’re supporting modders through Donation Points. Creators get real money proportional to mod download count. The mods are still free, to clarify.
$40 or these days $70 yearly for that?!? Jesus
Oh yeah I mean, it’s expensive. But if you’re very much into modding and like me don’t like your gbit download speed to be limited to 3mbit or whatever the free thing is… I get paying it.
I wouldn’t pay for what yearly costs now, but the 40eur lifetime price 10 years ago sure wasn’t a bad deal.
You can get Plex lifetime for around 80 USD during their occasional sales. I bought a lifetime sub for ≈80 USD on 2020-11-30
What do you mean? It was lifetime - lasted for the lifetime of the product.
Ohhh you thought they meant YOUR lifetime! Ooopsies
If you read the fine print, many “lifetime” warranties are like this too. They mean the “lifetime of the product” which is usually defined in the same fine print as like, 5 years or some other bullshit timespan.
yep I think osprey bags did something similar
It can be your lifetime, if that’s shorter.
With physical products it can be the “reasonable lifetime” of that class of product
Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.
Yeah, Plex lifetime was worth it.
Yup. Never ever buy lifetime licenses.
Even on software you love. Especially for software you love.
The alternative usually is subscription, is that better?
Nope. I’m here to tell you from 20 years of IT experience, you should definitely get perpetual licenses, whether they call them “lifetime” or not. Fuck all subscriptions.
🏴☠️🦜
If it’s for software you like, yes. Lemmy apps are a great example of this.
A lifetime license isn’t going to sustain the dev long term. If you like the app, buy a monthly subscription that gives them predictable income every month. Do a year if you feel confident about it. But honestly monthly is probably best.
For shitty corporate apps like Adobe, pirate that shit.
No. It is not the consumer’s job to support the software developers. It is the software developers’ job to develop a product that they can make a living on.
That’s… what the subscription cost is for. For the developer to make a living.
You act like nobody can make a living without these bullshit subscriptions. That is simply not the case, and anyone who disagrees is brainwashed by subscription pushers. You are being fleeced like sheep with all these bullshit subscriptions.
Software developers have been around for many decades, making damn good money all over the place. Only in the recent years have the software companies turned to the subscription model for everything, because their accountants figured out it makes them more money over the long term.
Again, it is not OUR job to support them. It is THEIR job to support themselves by making a product that people want to buy. I don’t want to buy their subscriptions, so they are doing a bad job of marketing to me.
I bought Affinity Photo because their software marketing was more attractive to me than any of Adobe’s bullshit subscriptions. I will continue to use the product I paid for (once) indefinitely, and if it stops getting updates I will still be able to use it as long as I want because I control its installation locally.
Lifetime is only as good as the contract terms.
I have paid for lifetime licenses a couple times and haven’t had an issue
this is why we need FOSS
GIMP or Krita might not be up to the standard as Affinity and Photoshop are, but at least while perfecting my skills in GIMP, I don’t have to worry about having to find a different software because a random company purchases it.
I really wish I liked gimp but I hate it so much. It’s so unintuitive it actually hurts every time I use it
That’s what I used to think as well actually. I opened it, saw the airplane control center, and closed it. But then I volunteered for editing a photo for my school, and I had to learn how to effectively create borders around the text, as I would have to makes a lot of changes to them. So I searched and came across this video. And then I understood that GIMP is actually a really powerful tool, you just have to learn how the developers intended you to work with it. Admittedly, having to use the drop shadow feature for text borders is pretty retarded, but it lets you fine tune the how the end result will look.
Yea, people don’t like it simply because they’re not used to it.
For instance, Cntrl-A, select all. Cntrl-Shift-A is a way more intuitive way to deselect all.
It’s the same reason people complain about OnlyOffice, which is stellar.
I love open office. Partially true though with gimp. I just loathe how it does layers and I hate how the tools and shortcut keys are. Some of the most common design patterns are completely ignored. Unintuitive design is unintuitive design, even if you get used to it.
OnlyOffice is different from OpenOffice. And OpenOffice nowadays is poorly mainted, it has been forked a while back to LibreOffice
Yeah I meant libre office actually. Only office I’m not familiar with.
I think I just learnt about only office. Been using libre office for a while, might switch!
Edit: I saw it doesnt natively support odt, so I might not switch after all…
I switched, never looked back. It’s so much better for me.
I’ve become used to an alt modifier being typically negative and shift positive so ctrl+alt+a would be more like the unselect all and shift would add to a selection (though I guess you can’t add more to the selection after “all”)
deleted by creator
We’re not using that word are we!
I’ll give the video a watch but yeah I’ve used it countless times at this point. Doing extremely basic things like adding text to a document is painful for me due to the extremely weird way layers and selection works. Not to mention basic stuff like zoom shortcut keys standard everywhere else do not work.
Iphone has always been pitched as intuitive and “it just works”, and it seems like it is that way for iphone users.
But when I try using one I’m lost as hell. It seems God awful. In other words, intuitive is whatever you’re used to.
It’s not just what you are used to, but yes that can play a role. I think apple gets a pass because of the image they have. My mom has an iphone and struggles with anything new or changed on it. But people told her it’s the easiest phone so she’ll never switch…
I say it’s “easy” because you have so little say in what you can do with it.
I feel the same about Krita. I used it for about a year of hobbyist drawing, and I just never could get comfortable using it.
Clip Studio Paint came out with 3.0, and after some deliberation I decided to pay for the update. Felt like coming home. I’ve done more art in two weeks than I’ve done in nearly a year of using Krita.
Even more so, you don’t have to worry about hardware support, since they can be compiled from source code, as long as you have pc with enough power to run it, you can run it, no matter which architecture
People who claim GIMP isn’t up to Photoshop inevitably reveal the only actual issue is that they learned photoshop first.
I used GIMP first and then Photopea (basically photoshop but web app) and GIMP is worse despite using it first. It’s just bad.
I’m thinking I might switch, I’m only a casual user (Literally just for shitposting) but they changed how the brushes work as far as I can tell, and it’s thrown me off.
Nah, your lifetime license will be fine. They’ll just slightly rename the products, release them as “entirely new, unrelated products” and cease updating it under the old name. You can still use the old, never updated product in perpetuity, if you want…
The first time this happened to me was a MUD client of all things. zMUD discontinued, check out the new cMUD! Also available with a lifetime license just like zMUD was!
It’s not uncommon to do what you said, but to also kill the old product so that they’re not available any more. Sometimes it’s the exact same product, but with a different name.
Sometimes it’s the exact same product, but with a different name.
That’s basically what zmud/cmud was. He basically slapped a different name on a major update and declared that since it’s a different product it requires a separate license and the old product would no longer be updated.
No need to kill the old product if you just let it stagnate. Things like OS updates and providing no support will slowly kill it for you, without you generating the ill will of prematurely killing lifetime licenses.
And that’s why I’m still using Tintin++ - it’s free and it’s great!
Honestly that would only mean no more updates for the 2.0 version though, right?
Like you already had to buy a new license for 2.0 so it would be like Affinity+Canvas going “we are releasing 3.0 tomorrow, sadly it’s subscription only despite our pledges because blah blah blah…” except in your case it’s a name change to allow them to do it without breaking their pledge, no?
I’m still crazy salty about when I invested ~$250 to get the Substance Painter + Designer suite, and got the “We’Re JoInInG tHe AdObE fAMiLy wooo!” Email…
Followed by the “Don’t worry we’ll still let you get indie licenses” email…
Followed by the “It’s gonna be subscription only but you can still keep the never-will-be-upgraded indie version we’re discontinuing.”
How can the likes of Adobe and Autodesk be so garbage and yet everything they taint with their miasmal existence is or becomes “InDuStRy StAnDaRd”? At this point I refuse to touch Adobe stuff partly because their membership is harder to quit than a gym, and the rest is just out of sheer spite.
I just refuse to use commercial creative software at this point. The blatant rug pulling is just expected now.
They are really good to push product with very cheap licences to students. Then it’s not easy to learn a new tool.
I wouldn’t call their licences very cheap for students.
You can apparently only get discounts on their bundle which includes all their programs and the discount gets worse after year one.
It’s a decent discount but it’s still expensive.
The alternative tools are disabled by the patents Adobe holds. They have to find other ways of implementing many techniques
I bought a lifetime license for Malwarebytes back in 2012 and I’m shocked that they still honor it to this day. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before I lose it.
Hell, I bought a hex editor with lifetime lic back in 1996. The fucking guy answered my email and sent me an upgrade almost 30 years later. Hats off to you.
I see so many ads for malware bytes that it almost looks like malware itself lol. I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
I’m pretty sure they have a lot of money.
Yes but not all of the monies. - Every single MBA ever to curse the earth with their presence.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
It’s my old go-to whenever I accidentally downloaded something nasty that AVG (back when it was actually okay) couldn’t find. Are they actually still good?
Gold standard free antivirus these days (and by that I mean the only one that isn’t useless)
Canva’s UI is somehow more fiddly than Word for making edits, but they’ve always seemed like a pretty decent company to me.
…of course that only holds true until it doesn’t - I’m looking at you, Google.
I learned my lesson about ‘lifetime’ updates with a Tom Tom GPS unit, from the late '90s, maybe early 2000s. After about 4 or 5 years I couldn’t install the latest map updates, so I contacted CS. They said, “Oh yeah, lifetime means the time of the expected life of the unit, which is 4.5 years. We don’t support that model anymore. Any other questions?”
That’s why open source rules
I use a lot of open source apps which aren’t as polished, the UIs need work, they’re clunky, and they won’t enshittify.
Yeah and there’s just as many paid for programs with the same issues… What’s your point? Want me to show you some open source programs that are polished? Heard of blender before? That’s not the point I was making anyway… The issue with non foss software is that you have ZERO control over it. Big corporations can decide to drop support at any moment or make a free tier paid.
Allow me to reiterate:
I use a lot of open source apps…and they won’t enshittify.
I love FOSS but GIMP and Inkscape aren’t nearly as usable or feature rich as the Affinity suite, let alone the Adobe suite.
Man i just hate these comments. Imagine you’re gimp / foss developer and you see an uncritical, unactionable, and dumbass comment about how a multimillion dollar company beats your software. Like of course mate Affinity & Adobe developers get money thrown at them, while gimp developers have to stand your ungrateful ass.
‘It doesn’t meet my needs’ seems like light criticism but I understand your point. I’m eternally thankful to devs but at a certain point it either does what you need or it doesn’t.
I just installed gimpshop the other day on a whim and immediately I could work at 90% capacity just based 20+ years of Photoshop muscle memory. Gimp never lasted more than a day with me the dozen or so times I’ve tried it before.
There are ways to make it work, and the tooling out there is getting better every day.
Looks like it’s last official version was released in 2007. Are you using a version from gimpshop.com with added adware/spyware? The wiki for gimpshop is pretty eye-opening…
I originally created Gimpshop, but I’m not the jerk who owns that domain and added adware & spyware to the source. Sorry about that. I hate that this guy is out there making my fun little project into an abomination.
I had no clue about this. Thanks for the heads up. Not sure which one I installed but it’s on my test machine and I can check tomorrow
GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284
Or compare with:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI
GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.
Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).
From what I understand, GIMP fell behind because it refused corporate donations while Krita accepted them. This lead to GIMP reducing in scope as the 1-3 part-time* developers (at least when I last really looked into it) realised they’d never catch up, leading to people donating less as they weren’t satisfied with GIMP’s simultaneous underpromising and underdelivering. Meanwhile Krita managed to receive enough money to hire a team of full time developers for several years, leading to better software, to more donations. It’s like the poverty trap, but with software.
- Edit: part-time isn’t the right word, more like casual
From someone with a passing interest, Krita seems on a similar trajectory to Blender - gathering momentum and going from strength to strength, whereas Gimp seems rather stuck.
Y’all gimp developers need to grow a pair
What amazes me are the number of companies selling “lifetime” VPN service or “lifetime” cloud storage service with a straight face.
Like… that is TRANSPARENTLY a scam. You’re literally gonna sell lifetime licenses to people with more money than common sense, until the entire system is overloaded, then just go out of business.
Thought it was funny that these two comments were next to each other.
I mean, you ARE getti ]ng what you pay for, just not until the end of YOUR lifetime,
at least with standalone software it’s going to work forever as long as the OS supports it. cant say the same for live service software that you can’t run at home
How much software is standalone these days, though? It seems like most companies are shifting to SaaS.
as long as you can host the “SaaS” elements yourself (nextcloud, for example) there’s a lot more software than you’d initially think. There will always be a market for self-hosted options for cloud software imo: loads of businesses are reluctant to move their internal infrastructure to the cloud
Nextcloud isn’t SaaS, unless you’re paying someone else to manage your server. Self-hosting is never SaaS.
I just bought a lifetime subscription to Nebula (a YouTube-like service akin to a co-op for content creators) and my rationale was
- Lifetime costs the same as ten years of annual priced subscriptions
- It will be cheaper than that due to inflation
- The service has been operating for 5 years, so it’s likely to last at least 10 more
- The service is philosophically opposed to the sort of place that may try to acquire it
Other stuff, no thanks. Too many practical products (as opposed to entertainment ones) have a great supply of methods to screw you and a great desire to screw you.
Not only software license, I believe any products “lifetime” comes with a lot of caveates.
Case in point, I purchased a fountain pen a decade ago, and started to leak (a crack around the threads) a few year back. The company is known for its lifetime warranty and good customer service, as per the warranty, it said if the product is defective (which I believe leaking pen body is), I am entilted for a replacement part or a new model of the same price if the pen is no longer in production. I reached out to customer service and was told, they can’t supply a replacement part because the pen is no longer in production and I’m not entitled to a new model because they doesn’t deem a leaking body a defect.
Why would you not name the company? If they won’t protect you, you are not obligated to protect them.
You are absolutely right.
The company is “Franklin-Christoph”
It looks like you can just ship the pen to them and request a repair or replacement. Maybe just ignore whatever the customer support rep said and follow this instead: https://www.franklin-christoph.com/pages/warranty
It never dawned on me that I can just ship it. I always tend to contact customer service before doing anything.
Anyways I have moved to a new country, it is kind of costly to ship a pen internationally (I am also afraid it’ll get lost somewhere since it’s such small package), added the uncertainty of they (Franklin-Christoph) would honor it, I am quite hesitant to do it.
Maybe he is an employee who bought the pen with employee discount? Just saying that’s possible, even though it’s a complete guess.
Ah, nope. Average consumer
Fair enough.
they doesn’t deem a leaking body a defect
Does that mean they purposely design their pens to leak? If it’s not a defect, it must be by design, right? Unless the user did something to break it, accidentally or otherwise
I believe they just chalked it up as normal wear and tear.
Update: The leak is from the threads where the pen cap screws on the pen, there is a argument here as to I twist it too tight, and over the years there developed a crack. You can barely see the crack, but its enough for the ink to leak bleed through.
Twsbi - a Korean pen manufacturer - had some bad plastic in one of their production runs, the body of the pen would crack in its threads at the tail of the pen
They handled it properly, I sent them an email with a photo of the damage, they asked for my postal address and sent me a replacement body. The reassembled pen has been working happily now several years later
I now have five twsbi pens (four piston fillers, one vacuum filler - the vac mini doesn’t leak on planes)
I have never tested the warranties on Zippo lighters or Maglite lights
*Edited spelling of twsbi
You meant Twsbi, its a Taiwanese manufacturer. Yes, their customer service is top notch! I also have a cracked cap from my Twsbi mini, and they sent me a replacement even without a picture (infact they sent it twice, because I didnt specified my pen color, so they sent it again).
That’s the one :)
Whelp… the Affinity Suite was pretty awesome and robust. Too bad they never did a proper linux port.
Buying a lifetime license, also known as… buying.
Products aren’t services.
The service is the developers releasing bug fixes and features that should have been there to begin with.
As a programmer, I cannot throw that stone. Software is hard.
But leaving software alone is the easiest thing in the world.
For Context here is one Email I got from Affinity yesterday:
To our amazing Affinity community,
Today marks a momentous new chapter in our journey together.
I am thrilled to announce that Affinity is joining the Canva family.
This is a moment of great excitement, anticipation, and profound gratitude for all of you who have been part of our story so far.
We know that those of you who’ve put your faith in Affinity, some since we launched our very first Mac app, will have questions about what this means for the future of our products. Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish. We’ve worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable.
None of that changes today.
In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
Canva’s revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to our incredible Affinity team. Your passion, dedication, and relentless pursuit of excellence have been the driving force behind our success so far, and I can’t wait to continue this journey with you all.
To our loyal users and the creative community, your support and feedback have been invaluable, we hope this this FAQ will answer many of your questions.
You’ve inspired us to push boundaries and continuously improve, and we’re excited to embark on this new chapter together.
You helped us start a movement.
Today, that movement becomes a revolution.
With heartfelt thanks, Ash Hewson - Affinity CEO
Ashley Hewson
CEO
Another Email I got today:
The Affinity and Canva Pledge
By the Affinity and Canva Teams
As we step into our shared future, we are committing to four pledges that we’re excited to share with the current and future Affinity community.
Earlier this week we shared the news that Affinity had been acquired by Canva. As the dust settles on the announcement, we wanted to say more about our future and our commitment to the Affinity community.
Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software. Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision.
Above all, together, we’re committed to continuing and amplifying Affinity’s position as the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market, while continuing to empower millions of designers to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.
1. 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.
2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.
We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, super fast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that it isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite. We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more.
These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.
3. We will provide Affinity free for schools & NFPs.
Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and NFPs all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month.
We’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact.
We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity.
4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.
Affinity and Canva were both founded on the basis that their respective communities – of expert and non-expert designers – deserved better. The tools available were overly complex, overly priced, or both. We know designers deserve better. They deserve the highest quality tools to serve their needs and they deserve to be treated fairly.
We also believe the design community also knows best what it needs. As such, we are committed to shaping our products based on your ideas, your feedback and your needs. To kick things off, we’d love to learn more about what you’d like to see as we embark on this next chapter of our journey. What would you like to see in Affinity? What features have you been dreaming of? What would you love to achieve? We’d love to hear from you here.
Thank you to everyone who has been an integral part of the journey so far. We’re excited for the future and can’t wait to see what we can build together.
With gratitude and excitement, The Affinity and Canva Teams
All links and images are from the email and not mine. I also replicated their email formatting in Markdown to make it easier to read on Lemmy.
None of that changes today
(It’ll take weeks, at least before we start screwing you)
