You have a very insightful perspective. Thanks for sharing. Having worked in Silicon Valley for 15+ years I am aware of the need for having a more stable revenue stream to fund research and development. The model I find fair is the "Maintenance Fee" which gives the user the ability to decide if they want to get updates or not. I use Camtasia and am happy to pay once a year to keep current on new versions given that the fee is reasonable. That being said, since I am not a graphic designer and only use the Affinity products when I absolutely have to for a video graphic, my need for a bunch of new features non-existent. I did go ahead and upgrade my suite to V2 for what I feel was a very reasonable price.
The company I work for subscribes yearly to Canva Pro for $120. I could easily see Canva doing a subscribe bundle where you get Canva Pro and Affinity Suite, with added integration for $150 a year. Doesn't interest me, but I could see something like that being offered. As long as they keep a similar perpetual license option, I'll keep buying it and upgrading as needed.
Surely Canva could make their money back in months (after programming and implementation) by just allowing their existing 175m users to have access to specific tools from the Affinity suite for small subscriptions or one off payments. They could have tiered subscriptions and could even go with a paid for token method like AI image generator sites do. I can see perpetual licenses going up in price but it makes far more sense for Canva to get a return on investment and future profit from their existing 175m users than from 3m perpetual license favouring pro and hobbyists.
Yup. There’s an entire bit at the end of the video where I basically say that 😂 There’s not necessarily a lot of incentive long term for Canva to massively improve affinity unless they can grandfather in enough pro users. At the numbers they care about, I don’t think is likely. To “repay” the assumed purchase cost on perpetual licenses at current price is an additional 20,000,000 affinity users. They’ll have far greater success migrating existing Canva users for an extra $5 a month.
@@manylearn Ah yeah, I wrote that when you were talking about £50-£60 subscriptions not being much. But yeah I agree. Now as a user of just Affinity Photo V1 I'm left wondering whether or not to still buy the current upgrade offer to V2 of all 3 apps plus some add on's for £84. I know you said in your last video that you didn't as you reasonably didn't think there are enough new things. But I'm starting to do digital painting in Photo with a Huion pen display and things like States and luminosity masks seem useful etc. That and the RAW edit is better for photography. Kinda seems like I should update to get the 3 apps which I'm sure are good, especially if future prices might be steeper. As a hobbyist tho it's hard not to think it might be throwing money into a dead end where I might later have to jump ship. :/
I should have stated way more emphatically that the pricing isn’t a big deal *if you make your living with these tools and can afford it* but yeah, Adobe subscriptions for hobbyists is downright awful. I don’t think anything will change meaningfully for the foreseeable and there’s a lot of life left in v2 so I would go ahead and buy it if you’re enjoying it. The license won’t go away and will work for many years even if they turned to subscriptions tomorrow. On a side note, If you’re doing digital painting, honestly I cannot recommend Krita highly enough. It is spectacularly good. (And open source)
@@manylearn Yeah, I don't see much if anything change until v3. I've now just wondering whether it's still worthwhile me paying the £84 to go from just having Photo to the v@ trio, not knowing what will happen when 3 comes along. Tempted to do so still, but as you did't and say you use other tools I don't know now.
Great video! WRT ROI, there's this daft capitalist nonsense thing where companies will sometimes buy things even if they can't make as much money off them as it cost because they'll earn more from it than they would have from other investments. This goes back to your point about how spikey income is less "valuable" than MRR even if the MRR is effectively lower. You can build the value of your company by investing in things, even if the investment will never pay off what you invested (see Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft).
must start searching for alternative software, if it becomes a subscription or it will be ditched and transformed in shity template software. Is just a matter of time. FK.Y Canva!
