Affinity V3 After 45 Days: Free Software, Familiar Fears

The Adobe Refugee's Dilemma

I've been an Adobe hater for years. Proudly, loudly, and with receipts.

When they raised the Photography Plan price and then charged me a cancellation fee for the privilege of leaving, I ditched the entire ecosystem. My creative stack became Figma, Affinity V2, and DaVinci Resolve Studio. Three apps, no subscriptions, no hostage situations. It worked. It worked beautifully.

So when Canva acquired Serif, I braced for the worst. Acquisitions rarely end well for the acquired. I expected the subscription model to creep in, the features to get paywalled, the soul of the software to get hollowed out and stuffed with "AI-powered" upsells.

Instead, they made it free.

Wait, What?

On October 30th, Canva dropped Affinity V3 with a "Free Forever" promise. The three separate apps, Designer, Photo, and Publisher, merged into a single application with three (and more) "Studios": Vector, Pixel, and Layout. One download. One file format. Zero dollars.

I should be thrilled. I'm not.

The Good: 45 Days In

Let me be crystal: I genuinely love using Affinity. V2 was already fast, the transitions between apps were smooth, and I built almost everything on it. School keynotes. Learning portfolios. Anniversary merchandise designs. Research paper figures. This website's entire asset library.

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V3 carries that DNA forward. The unification actually solves real friction. In V2, exporting slices or doing liquify work meant switching between apps. Now it's just a tab away. The new object selection tool (finally, a proper one) has saved me hours of manual masking. And the unified .af format means I no longer have to fight the OCD of dealing with .afdesign, .afphoto and .afpub files, despite them being compatible.

But the feature I've been abusing the most? The Live Glitch filter.

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As someone who already overuses every built-in effect I can find, this thing is dangerous. Chromatic aberration sliders, shredding controls, distortion parameters, all live and non-destructive. I've already made a dozen pattern variations I'll probably never use. No regrets still.

The Less Good: Performance and Polish

Here's where 45 days of daily use starts to show cracks.

I'm running this on an M1 Max MacBook Pro. 32GB of RAM. This machine chews through 4K timelines in Resolve without breaking a sweat. And yet, in Affinity V3, I've had moments where dragging a text frame with no effects causes visible lag. A bug so frustrating I had to reinstall, export as PDF and reconstruct my file just to get it to work on V2.

It's early software. I get it. But the whole appeal of Affinity was that it felt lighter and snappier than Adobe's bloated alternatives. If that gap closes, the value proposition weakens.

The UI: A Minor Rant

This is subjective, but I miss the old look.

V2 had personality. The tool icons and apps were color-coded. Designer was blue, Photo was purple, Publisher was orange. It felt intentional. The new unified interface is just grey. Professional grey. Inoffensive grey. The kind of grey that says "we tested this with focus groups and nobody complained."

It's fine. The transition was smooth. But I liked the old colors. They made the apps feel like distinct tools with distinct purposes, even when they worked together seamlessly.

The Real Problem: Free Forever

Here's where I lose sleep.

I've grown deeply skeptical of "Free Forever" as a business model. It's not generosity. It's strategy. Canva is reportedly planning an IPO. Affinity going free is almost certainly a user-acquisition play, a loss leader to funnel creatives into the Canva ecosystem where the real monetization happens (AI features, Canva Pro subscriptions, enterprise upsells).

I understand the logic. I even respect it, in a cold, capitalist way. But I don't trust it.

Adobe is evil. I know this. Everyone knows this. But Adobe is predictably evil. Their pricing will go up. Their cancellation policies will be hostile. Their AI will scrape your work. You can plan around this. You can budget for it. You can leave when it crosses your line and even send emails to hope for a price reduction.

Canva is being unpredictably kind. And that's much harder to navigate.

What happens when the IPO pressure mounts and the free model stops making financial sense? What happens when "Free Forever" becomes "Free Forever (Core Features Only)"? What happens when the AI integrations, currently optional, become mandatory for export or collaboration?

I don't know. That's the problem.

What I Actually Want

Honestly? I'd pay $300 USD for a lifetime license. The same model Blackmagic uses for DaVinci Resolve Studio. One price, perpetual updates, no strings. I'd pay it happily. I'd pay it today.

But that option doesn't exist anymore. The V2 apps have been pulled from stores. If you didn't already own them, you can't buy them. Your only path into Affinity now is through Canva's "generosity", which is another way of saying through Canva's terms.

The Climb Continues

I'm still using Affinity. I'll probably keep using it. The software is good, the workflow is solid, and the alternatives are either Adobe (no) or FOSS tools that don't quite match the polish (not yet).

But I'll forever keep my V2 installations.

Because the boulder always rolls back down. The question is whether you're pushing it yourself, or whether someone else is waiting at the bottom to charge you for the privilege.

Acknowledgments

• Title image: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Public Domain, Link