- Affinity is now free for everyone
- One app for Photo, Designer and Publisher
- Canvas premium subscribers also get AI tools in Affinity
Affinity is now free. You read that right. No catch, free – three of my favorite professional-grade apps for graphic design, photo editing and desktop publishing are now completely free for everyone.
Besides ditching the perpetual license (in a sea of subscriptions, that was always refreshing), Affinity has also rolled Photo, Designer and Publisher into a single app.
According to the company, it brings “professional vector, photo and layout tools together in one powerful space that offers everything you need to design, edit and publish without switching apps or breaking flow.”
Or pay any money, for that matter.
Free – but at what cost?
Since it was purchased by Canva back in 2024, there were concerns that the software would follow in its owner’s footsteps and introduce subscriptions for users and businesses.
In fairness, Affinity was quick to quash these rumours. At the time, it remained committed to the perpetual license model and made no promises that subscriptions were not on the cards. No way, no how.
After that there was little new. Until, out of the blue, the Affinity website went dark. Users could no longer purchase the software and were greeted only with a banner promising “Creative freedom is coming.”
So earlier this month, Affinity made all three existing apps free for iPhone and iPad users (I covered the news here ).
It turns out that the scale was not on creativebut on freejudgement.
And this is also the full Affinity experience. Not a stripped down version, but all the tools, all the features, everything that made Affinity great is in place. With a little extra.
Users with a Canva premium account now get access to the platform’s AI tools inside Affinity with the new Canva AI Studio. That means the introduction of tools like Generative Fill, Expand & Edit and Remove Background, putting Affinity more on par with unspoken arch-rival Adobe.
This is what I find particularly interesting about the move. Affinity already offered some of the best alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Along with the pro-grade software, the pull of a one-time fee compared to Adobe’s perpetual subscriptions was great.
Now, with the removal of any kind of cost, I’ll be interested to see how this will shake up the creative software landscape and whether Adobe users will switch over (I suspect Affinity is keen to see if this will happen as well).
You can get the new Affinity package from its new website by clicking here.
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