I am a daily user of Affinity Publisher and regular user of Affinity Photo. I bought version 1 when it came out, upgraded to version 2, and upgraded this morning to the new, free version.
This is NOT FREEMIUM as I understand the model, as it is not limited in any way. This is everything they were charging for and more, now free, with free upgrades.
I'm personally thrilled to get so much value for free.
I suspect Canva is willing to offer Affinity for free because it holds Adobe's feet to the fire and forces them to compete on Canva's home turf: the nonprofessional design market.
There's clearly a funnel for Canva Pro upgrades, but (to my knowledge) they've never paywalled formerly-free features, and it seems to be a profitable strategy so far.
OTOH some sources report Canva paid like $400M for Affinity. Even for a company like Canva it does seem significant. They might need to adapt their strategy if the investment doesn't pan out as expected.
Canva has a lot of premium features. The free version is good enough for most people but Canva makes their money on the companies paying for enterprise licenses. Canva is now looking to sell Affinity to those same enterprise users as well. Adobe gained massive market share due to how easy it was to pirate their suite. Canva is looking to try things a different way. Offering it for free will gain a lot more users than only those willing to pirate it. Once Affinity is common on every creative's resume, it becomes that much easier of a sell to enterprise that they need Affinity in their shop as well.
Simply put, they want to be Adobe but want a cleaner boost to their userbase than the piracy Adobe products were known for.
They offer it for free to gain more people with a Canva account, where they can sell their other products and services, not just limited to the AI integrations for Affinity Suite.
Offering it for free is likely to increase their user base significantly, which in turn will increase the number of people who end up paying for the AI features.
Literally on the landing page they have two columns comparing:
Affinity vs Affinity + Canva premium plans
And the FAQs under it are trying, repetitively, to upsell the Canva AI plans:
Are AI features available?
Yes. With a Canva premium plan you can unlock Canva AI features in Affinity.
Can I access AI tools without a Canva Pro or other premium plan?
No, these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts.
Up to 10 or 12 times, I think I've seen it just in that FAQ.
Freemium definition: A type of business model that offers basic features of a product or service to users at no cost and charges a premium for supplemental or advanced features.
Yes, you can add on additional AI if you want it. But, the product is not at all limited in features. It is a complete product, 100% of what we were paying for before, now for free, plus new features, also free.
I would define it more like a lost-leader than freemium.
Freemium would imply it's a stripped down version of what they used to sell, but that's not what's happening there. You get every feature that used to be behind a paywall for free and then they slapped some AI features on top.
If anything, I'm happy it's behind a paywall instead of ruining the core experience.
It is a freemium model, but they are doing it in the proper way. I’m a bit worried this could lead to enshittification down the road, but for now I’m glad they’re doing this, will definitely give it another try, and might throw in a few bucks even. (Especially if they reconstider their stance on Linux support!)
Right at this moment the situation is great (basically the same thing but for free!), but this does look like the beginning of a spiral of enshittification.
I have found the Affinity tools a godsend since the macOS 64 bit migration made all my old pre-subscription-model Adobe apps obsolete, and was glad to pay for them.
And after GPT-5's release, what would be the plan for subsequent elections? This seems to be a temporary play in delaying AI regulation if public sentiment further becomes that AI can have a strong influence in the elections.
It’s absolutely temporary, but 4 years feels like an eternity in this field and the m sure the major players would love to have that much time to entrench themselves before they have to battle “AI ban” legislation.
(assuming you are correct) It says something about how a company feels about the safety of their products when they feel like they should time the releases based on political events.
This is speculation because I don’t think any of the key players ever explicitly stated this is their strategy, but this year it feels like there’s some significant foot dragging on things like Sora and GPT-5. The big AI players really don’t want AI to become an election year punching bag and don’t want any major campaign promises around AI to placate a spooked electorate. And they really don’t want it to be revealed that generative AI powered bot armies outnumber real human political discourse 10-1. And they absolutely do not want an AI generated hoax video to have a measurable effect on the polls.
It’s a stopgap. If we get through this election without a major public freak out, it gives the industry 4 more years to take LLMs out to the point of diminishing returns and figure out safety before we get knee jerk regulation.
Here's something that talks about it. I can't speak for the legitimacy, but I'm not pulling it out of my ass. They may be pulling it out of theirs. :-)
I've listened to so many interviews that I couldn't tell you who said what at this point, but that is what I understood from somewhere. So, sure, take it as speculation.
I also believe that gpt-4o was originally called gpt-5. If you look at the image generation on their website from gpt-4o which has not been released, I believe that along with the voice caused Ilya to declare mission accomplished (AGI) and that is why there was a coup. The coup failed because no one wanted to wrap up the company or change the way it operated because they would lose a lot of money.
The reason the name was changed was because there was a big public scare about gpt-5 taking over and so Altman had to promise not to release gpt-5 soon. So they changed the name to gpt-4o (omni). Which is A) obviously dramatically a different architecture, B) a huge step up in capabilities (most still unreleased) C) very general purpose. Because of A) and B), this should obviously be a new major version (5).
Yes, this is speculation, but it's very obvious speculation to me. It's weird for me that most people not only don't share this view but seem to absolutely hate when I say it.
I don't hate this speculation, I just don't buy it at all. 4o's about the same in terms of reasoning as 4. People don't find the text abilities that much more usable over 4 (at least on the LMS leaderboard). It's faster and has audio2audio capabilities alongside new native image stuff I think, but how exactly is that AGI if 4 isn't? These models understanding and reasoning ability is still far too weak to do any serious economic shifts yet.
It's speculation with no basis at all, OAI has a track record of releasing half step models and 4o is no different just like 3 to 3.5 and the numerous subsequent 3.5 releases.
If you've used 4 and 4o they are too similar for 4o to have been trained from scratch
I imagine training people, and having everything I say be available in any language, matching my tonality, and being able to reach a global audience. I'm very much looking forward to this.
Someone, please ask OpenAI to stop artificially dumbing down ChatGPT by adding "um" to the audio output. I get that it is supposed to make it more human-like or something, but every time I hear it do that, I cringe and feel sad for humanity.
What if it just inserts filler words when the text generation is too slow, to make it sound more natural. It's exactly what people do when they're thinking about what to say next.
If they are using Eleven Labs, this is just the Stability setting. Turning it down will make it more realistic and closer to the training data. That is what causes the pauses and imperfections.
You can sign up and use their Voice Lab for free or maybe a few bucks and experiment with the slider for Stability and the other setting.
In my opinion, turning Stability down just a little bit to demo extremely realistic speech is a no-brainer. They could have turned it up and made it ultra-smooth, but that makes no sense. Why make your robot demo less realistic deliberately?
I took a summer job as a painter and did some other contracting stuff in my 30s after being in tech my whole life. I went from setting my hours to getting up at 5 am to be picked up to go to a job site, working hard all day, coming home, and going to yoga for body repair.
By the end of the summer, I was ripped. Best shape of my life, and I got paid to do it. I was very tempted to keep doing that for a living and probably would have had a more consistent income.
Hi. I basically bought an Apple Watch for one app, Just Press Record. I'd love to see that kind of functionality added to your app, so I can always record my random thoughts, and it ends up summarized on my computer.
The key for me is that it's a widget on the watch face. Glance at watch and with one click and I'm recording. If I have to fumble around with my phone or whatever to find and open an app, click a button, etc, I'll likely have forgotten whatever brilliant idea popped into my head before I get the recording started.
After building a few startups and working at a few, I spent a lot of years advising people who wanted to start a startup, and 99% of the time I told them not to waste their time and money. They massively underestimate how hard and expensive it will be, how many skills are needed... and how much LUCK has to do with it.
With my million dollar startup, it was years of research and stupidly hard work, and I had a tech and marketing background to build off of... and I had the luck of meeting the assistant to an Internet marketing "guru" in a bar and giving them a ride home. That assistant got the marketer to promote my product, which got others to promote. Without that bit of luck, it wouldn't have been nearly as successful. In truth, I probably would have gone bankrupt.
Another example... the year that YC startup school accidentally let everyone in, they had a speaker who was talking about what market fit looks like. They failed over and over again, building stuff nobody cared about. They had wasted nearly $500k of investment and were down to the last few dollars, and one of the founders had an idea. The guy speaking implemented it just to prove his cofounder wrong! That idea went viral and they grew into a unicorn.
In my opinion the talk wasn't about market fit. It was a cautionary tale about how lucky you need to get. Last I checked, I read that 82% of venture funded startups fail, even with all that money, talent, and connections. We rarely hear about them. We hear about the success stories, which expound upon the hard work and great idea and seem to overlook how much luck was a factor - and it always is a giant factor.
Having said that, I do think success can be engineered for some startups, if you have the time, money, patience, and constitution to go through lots of small quick failures to find that market fit, and then build your product with the support of a community. And, I think luck can be engineered for some people, like by going to conferences, being nice and providing value... and by befriending the assistants of influential people.
I setup a login just for working in VR. I get MUCH more done as I'm totally distraction-free, and it's much better for my neck, as I'm looking at the screens in front of me, instead of down at my laptop. Looking down at my laptop for years has become a source of chronic pain, and working in VR removes it.
Setup is a Macbook Air M1, Quest 2, elite strap, and over-the ear headphones. I use Immersed, which is free, and put up a big screen in the middle to work on, with two narrow screens on either side for reference material.
Because I can do VR anywhere with multiple screens and bigger screens. I also have a large 4k curved monitor on a high quality arm on my standing desk, but I prefer working in VR from my couch. :-)
https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurfs-next-chapter