If you are looking for a reasonably priced, non-subscription based alternative to Adobe Products Serif’s products including Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo have long been at the top of that list. You can buy them for a very reasonable one time price the way software used to be sold… at least you used to be able to. Now Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are no longer for sale. This includes both on the Microsoft App Store, the Apple Mac App Store and on the Affinity store itself. In fact the entire store seems to have been removed from their website and now you see this rather ominous message:
So what does this mean? We have no idea! Of course on October 30th I will be sure to bring you the details. In the meanwhile it means you simply cannot buy any of the Affinity products.
On the other hand, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are all still available on the Apple App Store for iPad OS. Even better, the unlock DLC for each application has dropped from $20 each to $0! We do not know if this change is temporary or not, so if you are interested in getting Affinity Photo, Designer and/or Publisher for the iPad completely free, be sure to download and “claim” them before October 30th just to be safe!
This entire announcement comes a little over a year after Serif, the maker of the Affinity products, was acquired by Canva. Given that Canva has subscription based pricing, people were no doubt concerned by this acquisition. As a result, a day after the acquisition, Canva made the following pledge:
It will be interesting to see if on October 30th Canva will continue to honour this pledge! You can learn more about Affinity products no longer being available (as well as being available for free on iPad) in the video below.