Before I get into today’s topic, let me take a moment and say welcome to my new home on the web. After a year at my former .blog address, I wanted to make some changes, including changing to a dotcom and just generally make the site a bit more clean and spartan. After all, you’re not here to see games or bikini models. (Or if you are, you’ve been terribly misled.) Please do me the honor of updating your bookmark for the site, now let’s get to today’s topic.
It was announced on October 30th that Canva would reveal what the future of Affinity would be. If you’re not familiar with either, let me help. Affinity is a creativity suite of software that helps with page design, photo editing, and publishing. Until recently, they were in version 2 of three apps: Publisher, Photo, and Designer. A little over a year ago, I escaped the Adobe bear trap and moved over to their software because of a couple reasons. One was it didn’t require a subscription, which is always a huge plus with me. Two, it was a small developer who could use my support far better than Adobe. The owner also had said loudly that his company was not for purchase by anyone.
So much for that.
The news broke in early 2024 that they were purchased by Canva, and that was when people knew things were about to take a deep decline. After all, the company isn’t exactly adored by designers. For a while, there really was no difference because the Affinity team were still updating the software regularly. But in the last few weeks leading up to today’s news, the team wouldn’t give straight answers to their users when asked directly at times if this software that they loved was about to go subscription-based. If the answer isn’t no, then it’s perfectly logical to believe the answer is yes, right? That was a red flag for quite a few.
Fast forward to October 30th, 2025, which is when the big reveal was to be announced about its future under the Canva umbrella. That news was that Affinity will become a standalone app with its three software packages in one. It also said that it was now free. (As someone who spent about $100 on this software not that long ago, imagine my thrill at that news. But I digress.) The only caveat that barely gets mentioned in all of the press is that there will be an option to subscribe to Canva’s AI Premium tool.
Of course, there will be.
This is where I get a little worked up, because in most of the tech sites I follow, this part of the story is very much undersold. Instead, some of the best known tech news platforms are talking about how this is going to be a jab at Adobe. They discuss the details of what it will feature and how many different platforms it’ll be on. Yada yada yada.
It’s lovely to have so many cheerleaders for the news, but I want to know if these veterans in the industry really think that Canva just paid about a quarter of a billion dollars to give away software. You don’t think that AI Premium tool is going to encroach more and more into the software as time goes by? You believe it’ll just be a little section hidden in a menu somewhere for years to come? Suddenly Canva is a charitable organization that just buys companies to not make any money on their investment?
You have got to be kidding me.
I’m willing to be proven wrong. Unlike my far more tenured colleagues, I have no contacts within these organizations like Canva. I don’t have someone I can fire an email to that is actually likely to respond. I also don’t crave access to those people, thus making my cheerleading for them (in some sites I’ve read) a necessity. If in three years I’m still using Affinity and there isn’t a nag on that screen somewhere in every window I open for Canva premium services, I’ll return right here to this blog (have you updated that bookmark yet?) and pronounce I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before, I’m sure it’ll happen again.
All I can tell you is that when most software apps people love get bought, I don’t know of a lot of examples where the company just gives it away and has no plan whatsoever to make money from including it or aspects of it. Maybe these tech news sites have details I don’t. If Canva bought this company with zero plans to make money with it, no one will be more surprised than me. The fact that this possibility exists and gets no more than a sentence or two in the articles about the announcement I’ve read, though, is dismaying for me. It makes me question how unbiased many of these sites are. But that’s a whole other article for the future.
I want Canva to prove me wrong on this. I mean that. I want them to show me year over year that this isn’t going to transform into a subscription service or be consumed into their products which they are already charging people to use. Please prove me wrong over time.
If you do, I already promised I’d admit I misjudged it entirely today in this very blog. But if you don’t, well… at least I can design a pretty graphic to show people I was right.
Just not with Affinity.