My Thoughts on Affinity’s Changes in 2025

19 Oct, 2025

Creative freedom is coming.
It’s the beginning of something new. A shift in how creative freedom is defined.

Be honest—if you see these words in a marketing email from a tech company, would you get excited, cringe, or feel suspicious?

For me, it’s the latter two.

My heart sank when I received an email from Affinity saying, “Creative freedom is coming” and announcing a major event for Oct 30.

It immediately gave me flashbacks to when MotionVFX, a popular motion templates company for Final Cut Pro that had no subscription products, teased everyone about a major product release with the “Create Further” slogan, which ended up being a subscription service containing highly requested products that are exclusive to the subscription.

While Affinity has been extremely tight-mouthed about the details, you can see why a slogan like that immediately set off my “subscription is coming” radar.

Another fear that the word “freedom” in this campaign slogan sparked in me is that the Affinity apps—which have been gracefully void of AI—will be littered with AI in a major update.

Affinity was a champion for design apps without subscription

Affinity is a software company behind Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, which are some of the best and most popular alternatives to Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, respectively.

Their major selling point? No subscription.

Affinity literally gloated about their lack of subscription on their website homepage—

Most creatives initially came to Affinity because they didn’t want the Adobe subscription.

And now, when a user voiced that they hoped the Oct 30 announcement wouldn’t involve subscription, Affinity replied:

“We love hearing feedback and suggestions and will be sure to share your comments with the team! You can also post any suggestions to our forum which has a dedicated area that is closely monitored, where you might also find other users adding weight to the suggestion. ”

—@Affinity

View original Reddit screenshot

Such a stark contrast to when they used to boast about no subscription—not even any implication about perpetual license being available.

Adobe hasn’t been a well-liked company since they switched to subscription. A lot of professionals (including me and colleagues at my work) put up with Adobe products simply because they are “the norm” and large institutions often license Adobe products in bulk for some kind of discount and they aren’t willing to pay extra just so that individual employees or departments can use something different—good luck explaining to IT why you want Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop when they already bought Adobe licenses for everyone.

This is something I really dislike about working in a university but I guess it’s a topic for another post.

Back in 2024, there was yet another wave of creatives migrating from Adobe to Affinity due to Adobe’s updated Terms of Service that supposedly would allow Adobe to access on the user’s work and use it to train generative AI.

The backlash from creatives was so severe that Adobe had to update its ToS and write a whole blog post to “clarify.”

Even though my work provides me with full access to all the Adobe apps and services, and I’m not a professional graphic designer, I purchase all 3 Affinity apps to show support for the company:

Over 2 years later, I wanted to design some vector art for the wedding photobook for my wife and me. I remembered I had a license for Affinity Designer on the iPad so I went to the App Store, downloaded the app, and got it done the same day:

It was amazing.

No subscription, no generative AI—these are why most creatives chose and supported Affinity.

Canva acquired Affinity

This happened in 2024 and most of the Affinity community considered it as bad news. Not only is Canva fully subscription-based, it’s also littered with AI (and the company jacked up the subscription price by 300%).

While Canva is popular among non-designers as a shortcut to make nice-looking graphics, it has made many professional designers’ lives harder. I’m not going to get into the details, but the gist is that Canva is for non-designers while Affinity is for pros, and so such an acquisition really made the pros worry that Affinity will turn into a subscription and get the AI treatment.

You can’t buy new licenses for Affinity apps anymore

Appearing to be a marketing stunt, Affinity removed the option to purchase licenses for their apps on their website on Oct 1, presumably until Oct 30, the big announcement.

I understand the need to generate buzz and hype leading up to a major event, but there can’t be a more unprofessional way than this, given that Affinity apps have always been marketed towards professionals.

Pros around the world use Affinity apps for their work; there are teams and even companies who rely on Affinity apps—they all should all be able to purchase/upgrade licenses as needed. Removing such an option can create undesirable consequences for those who need to use the software:

“Yooo wtf are you guys thinking? I rely on your product for my work.. moved to Mac and I can't buy it. Dumb move.”

View the thread

View original Reddit screenshot

Imagine leading a graphic design team running Affinity apps and not being able to buy new licenses for a new hire—I would lose trust on Affinity.

It also negatively affects prospective customers:

“Tbh I’m more then pissed right now. My free trial ended exactly one day before they ended the sales and I invested already approx 20 hours in learning the new system. I did this invest because I have an appointment on the 25th of October I was preparing a document for and already made good progress. Now I have the file I cannot open and need to switch and invest in another system. It’s completely inconsiderate of their customer to end sales wothout any fallback.”

—u/No-Average-3239

View original Reddit screenshot

It’s hard to fathom why Affinity would think this is a good idea at all—or perhaps the Affinity team didn’t have a say in it?

Moving the Affinity forum to Discord

In recent years, there’s a trend where companies migrate their longstanding public forums to Discord. I think it’s a terrible idea—as do many others^{1, 2}, including the Affinity community—because public forums are like community-backed knowledge bases that come up in search results, accessible to everyone, while Discord is mostly a real-time communication platform and whatever knowledge shared on it are only accessible to members of that server.

Being able to access community knowledge via Googling is incredibly useful for not only beginners trying to learn the apps, but also professionals who are troubleshooting or looking for tips and tricks and resources. It’s easily accessible and requires no sign-in or sign-up.

Discord is a terrible platform for this purpose in comparison.

First—

The information in the server is only accessible to those with a Discord account and are part of Affinity’s server. If you don’t have a Discord account, you now have to first sign up for one and join the server, and then check if anyone has answers to your question. If not, you basically just signed up in vain and handed over your email address to yet another company.

This is a lot more friction between the user and the knowledge base compared to just a simple search on Google.

Posts and its replies in forums are also shareable with a link (just like this).

This meant that if you came across a post with valuable information, you could share it with anyone or just bookmark it to come back later. Again, you don’t have to be part of the forum to do this.

While you can grab the link to posts and messages in Discord (and you have to be a Discord user and part of the server first), the links will only be accessible to those who have a Discord account and is part of the Affinity server.

Second—

Discord doesn’t seem to be well-regarded in the privacy community. There are numerous posts on forums where users voiced their concerns about Discord’s privacy policy^{3, 4, 5}.

This month—yes, the same month that Affinity migrated to Discord—Discord reported a data breach where sensitive information, such as government-issued IDs, IP addresses, profile information and so on, was stolen.

While one could argue that a public forum offers no better security on privacy, I think most forums collect less user data in general as you only need an email address to sign up, while Discord requires you to enter your date of birth:

…and by default, all these settings are on:

All that just because a user wants to access Affinity’s community knowledge base? Just…why?!

More reasons the forum was better than Discord

Forums are well-structured and easily searchable. Look at this glorious advanced search:

And compare that to Discord’s search:

Not even close!

The forum also supported more text formatting options that made it easy to create long posts like this one that contains design resources and extensive information on them:

Anyone who’s somewhat familiar with Discord knows that it’s not really a platform for posts like this.

Discord is also much more real-time and ephemeral. An article describes Discord as “a firehose of messages with no clear question/reply structure” and I can’t agree more.

It can be extremely difficult to keep track of which messages are a reply to another message and which messages are starting their own topic. Not everyone uses the “Reply” button, and even less use the “Thread” function when a message gets many replies.

In a large, active channel, a message you send can quickly get pushed beyond the visible chat window by other new messages within minutes.

Aside from the benefit of more real-time interactions, I really beg the question:

How exactly is Discord a better platform than the forum?

Note: I understand that the old forum will remain accessible on a read-only basis, which is good. But at some point, the info there will become more and more obsolete with every major update the Affinity apps receive, and users will have to go to Discord for more up-to-date info.

Subscription coming?

Let’s take a step back and look at what Affinity has done so far:

• Acquired by Canva, a subscription-only platform
• Lack of commitment to no subscription and perpetual license in recent social media responses
• Sales of new licenses paused
• Affinity apps on the iPad made free
• Migration from a public forum to a walled platform, Discord (maybe in preparation for a major backlash, to prevent it from surfacing on Google search results?)

All signs point to a major shake-up for the Affinity suite—I would be incredibly surprised if the Oct 30 announcement doesn’t have anything to do with subscription.

Hoping for the best

That’s all the community can do now. No one knows what Oct 30 will bring, and the best-case scenario will be that perpetual licenses will still be available and affordable, even if a subscription option is offered.

Affinity made 4 pledges to the community when Canva acquired them, and soon, we will see if Affinity is true to their words.

It does seem like the migration from forum to Discord will stay no matter what, though, and that’s a real shame.

I hope that once Oct 30 rolls around, most of this post will age poorly, and all of us Affinity users will be able to say—

“Whew, Affinity did the right thing after all!”

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#opinion