After weeks of silence, Affinity announced that it has replaced its paid app suite with a single app that is free for everyone. The only catch? If you want AI functionality like Generative Fill, Expand & Edit, and so on, you have to pay for a Canva subscription.
“When Affinity joined the Canva family last year, we made a promise to preserve its power while expanding what’s possible,” the announcement post explains. “Today, that vision comes to life with the all-new Affinity: a studio-grade creative app that brings vector, photo, and layout tools together in one high-performance platform. Fully featured. Lightning-fast. And completely free.”
For those unfamiliar with the drama that just just unfolded, Affinity made a suite of well-received creative apps that included Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher. I’ve been using Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop for years and have highly recommended it at every turn. But when Canva bought Affinity in early 2024, users were worried that it would turn into a paid subscription like Adobe CC despite promises to the contrary. And as I tweeted the other day, Affinity quietly removed its app downloads from its website and then various app stores in recent weeks, triggering more worries.
But it’s all good. Now, the Canva-owned Affinity has moved all the functionality from the separate apps in the previous app suite into a single app called Affinity. It’s free on Windows (x64 and Arm) and Mac, and an iPad version is on the way. And yes, it’s really free, though you can pay for a Canva premium subscription (Pro, Business, Enterprise, Education) to get the AI-based features in the app too. Canva Pro is $120 per year.
I use Affinity Photo 2.x every single day, so I was curious what this would look like. Basically, the app has four modes—Vector, Pixel, Layout, and Canva AI—with Pixel being the stand-in for Affinity Photo, and it seems to look and work much like its predecessor. You can also toggle off the modes you don’t want, which is nice, and toggle on additional modes like Typography and others. There’s a lot to figure out, basically.