So about Affinity v3

Alex Ward

Nov 1, 2025 • 4 min read

Affinity v3 launched to some fanfare yesterday, and I have some thoughts about it. They're mostly disappointment in abandoning a core reason that creators (like myself) paid for the software, but they're also opening up the field. We'll get to that in a sec.

First, though, I think we need to talk about the overall timeline leading up to this release.

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Since Canva's the one taking all of these actions after their acquisition of Serif, I'm just going to use "Canva" below.

The Timeline

October 2nd, 2025: Canva pulls sales of Affinity v2 citing "big changes"
October 5th, 2025: Canva moves the Affinity forums to read-only mode, and transitions the community to Discord
For 25ish days, users in the forums comment on what they think is happening, with mild panic. Canva employees respond with "just wait for the announcement". Meanwhile, folks are confused that sales are closed.
October 31st: During the Canva keynote (embedded below), the "new Affinity" is announced — the key feature of it is "it's now a free SaaS product".

The Announcement

To summarize, they've done a few substantive things:

Everything is just now a single app: Affinity by Canva, and it got a rebranding (also it's now green for some reason).
It is "free" in the sense that you do not have to pay for it, but you do have to create a Canva account and sign in with it.
Canva's AI features are a paid add-on and can be disabled.
The iPad apps are not done, and cannot be downloaded yet. For the moment, you can still download v2 on iPadOS, but it is unclear how long that will last.
No native Linux support, (but it does seem to run in Wine).
You can run v2 and v3 alongside one another, they are different executables.
File types have changed, and are not backwards compatible, if you open a v2 file it will convert to v3 and warn you about this (like v2 did with v1)
Image Trace: an ai-backed (not genai) feature to convert flat images to vectors.
A fair number of bug fixes and added features

An Aside about killing the forums

I've written a lot about this, and how walled gardens are bad for community:

The state of play now is that if anyone has an issue with Affinity v3, they cannot visit and browse the forums without making a discord account. You now have to log in to discord to get potentially valuable information.

I have no idea why they did this. The forums can't have been that onerous to maintain, and moving everything into a walled garden smacks of "yeah we don't care about this thing" to me. Maybe Canva thinks their core audience just really loves Discord, but there wasn't any (to my awareness) reasoning given for this move.

I don't think they care about Affinity or its existing users

I, and many others, paid for Affinity v2 because we wanted software that was a single purchase and not a subscription. Likewise, I'd have been happy to pay for a v3 after paying and using v2 for several years, but that's not what we got. Instead, we got a SaaS product, like Canva, that is currently free.

Now, Canva is positioning this as a good thing: It's free! Your barrier to entry is now zero! Rejoice, creatives everywhere. And on its face, this is a good thing. I have friends that want to get into desktop publishing but can't justify the purchase over their other needs. I don't have a problem with them giving away the product.

But my concern is that companies never keep their SaaS products free. Eventually, Affinity will not be able to skate along on Canva VC money. Eventually, they're going to paywall features, or start mining your data. It's still a subscription, but that subscription just happens to be "$0".

It seems pretty clear to me (and many users in the new Affinity Discord) that this is a pure play by Canva to hurt Adobe, by enticing users over from the Adobe Creative Suite over to Canva. Because it's free, they're probably hoping they can siphon market share away from Adobe, and then upsell those creatives on either using Canva or Canva AI features.

What is unclear to me, is what they think of Canva users who now have access to Affinity. Canva's not exactly marketed to serious creative professionals; it's marketed towards business professionals who just want something that "looks good" and is done quickly. This is why they've been pushing AI features left and right. So I don't think this move is geared towards them.

It feels just like "hey we have a ton of money and this'll take some of Adobe's market share". What happens if that doesn't work? Or if it does, but they need to start showing revenue growth, and they suddenly have a big pile of non-paying subscribers.

The own-nothing era continues

Yeah, I'm mostly disappointed that a key tool in my workflow is going to enshittify eventually.

For now, I'm going to stick with v2, and try my hardest to make a Scrivener workflow that doesn't make me want to slam my face on my desk.