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Affinity is Now Nominally Free

Marcus Mendes at 9to5mac:

Affinity has announced a complete overhaul of its design suite. Starting today, the company is unifying all its tools into a single app for vector, photo, and layout work, and making it permanently free.

Me, last year:

Canva bought Serif. Gulp.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. You can’t develop professional software with no revenue, so where is the money going to come from?

Michael Tsai:

The immediate catch is that now you need to log into a Canva account to use the app […]

Ah. Ads for subscription-only features. Serif Canva now have a big red button in their executive suite that prints a little bit of money every time they press it. No company, not even Apple, can stop themselves from pressing that button.