And I did not have this on my 2024 bingo card.

Hello, my name is Brad. I review tech for creative professionals, and I was genuinely surprised by this move.

But the more I thought about it, the more it makes sense. So let's dive into the details. What is it? What happened? What does it mean?

If you're not familiar with Affinity, they have three programs that are very similar to what Adobe offers.

They have one which is Affinity Photo, similar to Photoshop, Affinity Designer, which is kind of a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator.

It's kind of a design slash illustration program.

And there's their latest program, which is Affinity Publisher, which is like InDesign.

First of all, the amount of money that Canva spent to buy Serif slash Affinity, Serif is the company that owns Affinity, has not been disclosed.

But Bloomberg is reporting that it's in the hundreds of millions of pounds range.

I didn't realize how popular Canva was. They have 170 million users.

Now, Affinity has about 3 million users, which sounds about right, but these are very different programs.

Seeing as how Canva is an entry-level service that has like a free tier. So anybody can join and use their design services there. And then if you want all the bells and whistles, you join, it's about $120 a year for their base level price tier.

Whereas Affinity's pricing is very different. It's a one-time purchase. You can buy it on an app-by-app basis. I just bought the entire suite. So now I can use it on a Mac, a PC, an iPad, wherever they port it to.

And when I first heard the news, I tweeted out, I don't know what to think about this because at the moment, I really didn't.

A couple of things have settled down since yesterday when this was originally announced that have clarified a lot of things.

Many of the concern comments that I saw over on Twitter were all about, "Oh no, this is probably going to go to the subscription route."

"Oh no, they're probably going to pump this thing full of AI."

Today, this morning, they released an announcement, Affinity did, just kind of talking about what to expect going forward.

Here's the page. This is called the Canva Affinity Pledge.

So they've made four pledges here. The first one is fair pricing, perpetual licenses will always be offered, and we will always price Affinity fairly and affordably.

Number two, this is really good news here and makes a ton of sense. Accelerating Affinity. Affinity is here to stay. It will remain the highest-quality pro design suite, and we will now accelerate the rollout of new features.

Number three, accessibility for all. Affinity Suite will soon be made available without charge to schools and registered nonprofits.

Brilliant move.

Number four, community-led. We are committed to shaping Affinity's future, guided by your ideas and feedback.

So this is great news. The very first thing that popped into my mind is that they were going to be changing the price structure.

So the fact that they're really committing themselves right now to this perpetual license that you can get really makes a lot of sense. It makes a ton of sense for a couple reasons.

The main reason Affinity gained traction, especially over the last decade or so, was not just the quality of their software, which is very high, but also the fact that they were competing directly against Adobe after Adobe had moved to their Creative Cloud subscription plan.

So a huge amount of the appeal that drove people to thesee products in the first place was that pricing structure.

Now, it doesn't say anything that they won't offer some kind of subscription beside that, it just says they will be offering those licenses. I wouldn't be surprised to see them roll this into Canva at some point in the future.

If you think about Canva's user base, when people start using it, they're like, "Oh, I need to put together a flyer or an email or just some kind of little design to put on social media."

And then they get used to using the program and it becomes really easy to kind of put together nice looking things that just look a little bit more professional than when you might put together a Microsoft Word or something.

You use it more and more and realize, "Okay, I need those other features. This is worth my investment. I'm going to pay the $120 a year."

You upgrade. Now you're a pro-Canva user. You get better and better at it. Maybe you use the tools more and more and you need something more professional level, now they have that path to take you there.

And so I wouldn't be surprised if at some point down the road, there's a third tier like Canva Pro where they're able to incorporate you or just kind of take those users and kind of maneuver them into the Affinity Suite.

I also wouldn't be surprised if we saw a lot of sharing of features here.

Number two is they said that they wanted to accelerate the development of Affinity. That is really, really good.

There were also some concerns from people on Twitter who just kind of mentioned this means they're probably going to push hard into AI the way Canva has, and that is probably true.

Affinity serves a lot of different areas, right?

So you have photographers, you have designers, you have illustrators.

And as an illustrator myself, every time I say the word AI, I throw up a little bit of my mouth, but to a lot of other constituencies, designers and that sort of thing, it's not such a bad word.

In fact, just searching Affinity and AI, you're going to see a lot of forum posts asking, "Hey, when are you going to be incorporating a lot of the AI features like Photoshop has over the last year or two?"

And Affinity has pretty much said, "No, we're not planning any of that. None of that is on the roadmap now."

I think now a lot of those features probably are. That's just a guess. It's just speculation. But this is based on how Canva has tried to incorporate a lot of different AI tools into their app already.

Number three, I think is really, really smart, and that is making it free for like nonprofits and educational institutions.

This is just smart because if people are learning to use your tool when they go out into the workplace and the professional environment, that's what they're going to know and that's what they're going to want to use.

It just makes a ton of sense to offer it for free for people who are learning.

This is consistent with how Canva has operated for a while.

They've been free for schools and nonprofits and getting people kind of into their ecosystem early and trained up on that stuff just makes sense.

So I'm really glad that they released this pledge. It makes a lot of sense. It puts a lot of concerns off to the side for a lot of people, and I think will help Affinity continue to grow and get better.

And I have been curious as to what they're up to.

If you look at their layout of everything they've done in the last, I don't know, eight to ten years, they released Affinity Photo on the Mac, then they released Affinity Designer for the Mac.

I may have mixed those two up.

But then they released them for Windows, and then they created some really innovative versions for the iPad.

And then they came up with Affinity Publisher, and then they released that on the iPad as well.

So if you look at their roadmap over the last several years, they've been really, really busy.

Just in the last, I think it was about a year and a half ago, they released version two of all of their software across all of the apps at once.

So we haven't heard a ton from them in the last year and a half. So I have been curious, what's next? Are they going to make a new app? Are they just going to continue iterating?

So it should be exciting, especially with the idea of accelerating the development. What are they going to do? What are we going to have?

Also, we're seeing Canva really take on Adobe head-on, which yay.

I use Adobe software. I like Adobe software. Nothing against Adobe, but also, Adobe really does need some stiff competition out there to keep them on their toes. It's always a good thing.

But what do you think about this acquisition? Let me know down below in the comments. Thank you all for watching, and I'll talk to you in a couple of days.