[carlosjobim]

> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves.

Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors.

Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?

I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.

[trollbridge]

Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually.

I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".

[ryandrake]

This is exactly why I bought Affinity. That, and the fact that the old version did not require an "account" and "activation". You send them money, they give you an unlock key, and that's the end of your relationship with them.

[tonyedgecombe]

>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing?

I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.

[okayjustonemore]

Graphic designer here. Adobe’s products are the golden standard in the industry and are often the only products used by entire graphic teams, being the odd one out using Affinity’s or (heaven forbid) Corel’s tools makes collaboration difficult (if not entirely impossible) due to how unfriendly and unpredictable portability between apps can be, and unpredictable is the last thing you want in an environment where precision is absolutely essencial.

It’s sad, really. Adobe’s apps are powerful, yes, but they’re stuck in time. They perform horrendously and have terrible UI/X that aren’t even standardised between apps (even something as simple as the icon for their own assets library cloud is not the same between apps).

How I wish someone would come along and eat Adobe’s lunch to force it to pull itself together for once, but alas, that’s unlikely at best.

[carlosjobim]

Considering how cheap Affinity is (and now it's free). Why don't studios just get both apps? There's almost no learning curve in switching between them.

I foresee a lot of smaller actors switching to Affinity in the future, just like tons of people went to Canvas.

[okayjustonemore]

Canva is a nice tool for light work only, but no studio, agency or design department worth their salt relies on Canva for more serious work—and rightfully so, Canva is not a player in the same space as Adobe and Affinity, for example.

Affinity is nice, and I really do wish they would corner Adobe a bit more so they could get their act together. But the fact is Adobe has encroached upon every corner of this industry, pretty much all of their apps are the standard tools for any given design job (from both a software and hardware perspective). It would take a massive amount of effort to convince designers used to Adobe’s tools to switch to an unproven new tool, and it would take an even bigger effort to actually make these new tools become the standard.

I would love to give Adobe the boot, but the truth is that no one has been able to meet Adobe’s apps head on as of yet.

[carlosjobim]

But that's what I mean with studios installing both. You're not forced to choose either Adobe or Affinity. Since you can install different software on a machine, it would be in the interest of every studio to work with both apps. No need to give Adobe the boot.

Now that Affinity is free, you will have many more clients and small studios sending you material in their formats.

As for Canvas, I expect every pro studio to be able to work with that format, since legions of clients will make their stuff in Canvas and send it to you and vice versa.

It's like Visa and MasterCard. You don't have to pick only one, and if you're smart you will accept both.

[okayjustonemore]

The thing is, studios might “offer” it, but designers aren’t likely to go for the new kid on the block with Affinity’s option when Photoshop is sitting right there; and Canva doesn’t play any part in this little software war, really. Canva is not aimed at pro work, professionals do use it if needed but it is not a tool of choice for any serious design work, it’s really just a stop-gap tool to enable non-designers to do some decent design work, but nothing more than that.

The truth is Adobe has a massive upper hand here in both market share and public perception. Affinity’s offerings might be 100x better, but they will never be “THE Photoshop”—that’s how deep Adobe’s claws are buried within this industry.

[carlosjobim]

You're probably right. But Adobe were also very successful when they used the pay-once model.