To be clear, it's unattractive because we're at step 1 or 2 of a familiar 3-step playbook where "free" looks great today, but not tomorrow. It might not be this year, or next year, but eventually Canva will do something shitty to extract revenue from its users. A mildly crappy outcome if you never paid for it, but a really frustrating one for people who did pay Affinity for a software license.

That’s a good way of putting it. Previously Serif’s goals were aligned with my wishes. They’d release a new version of the software ever so often and I’d pay to upgrade. Fair.

Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.

Once they manage to get enough Adobe customers on there and get some good market share, the investors will want their money multiplied (and you can't realistically do that just with AI features), so they will use the same playbook like any other business out there that used VC money to take over a market, and make you pay, probably first for proper support, and then more and more updates will come only to the + subscriptions.

The alternative is that they monetize it the same way Canva monetizes its other products: most features free, "pro" subscription for online collaboration/server-driven stuff and a library of stock content. Plus an enterprise tier.

All of that could get added to affinity without changing its core offering, which would be consistent with both their past strategy and their current messaging.