Affinity by Canva: What's the Catch?

On October 30th, 2025 Canva announced it consolidated all three Affinity apps into one and is "now completely free for everyone". A change that has been far more controversial than they may have been anticipating; with a negative response that I feel has been entirely overblown.

Posts on Reddit following the keynote erupted with all kinds of hot takes and speculation; most of which could be refuted from reading the FAQ or watching Affinity's three minute response to the outcry on YouTube.

"If it's free you're the product."

Not if they already have a very successful business model that would greatly benefit from dethroning Adobe as the standard in workplaces. I, like many other creatives I know, grew up learning Photoshop by "acquiring" the Adobe Suite near the end of middle school. Then eventually being a Creative Cloud subscriber later in high school; a subscription I've kept for more than a decade because it's the tools I know best and grew up learning. Canva is bringing Affinity to the masses to create a much lower barrier for entry for anyone and everyone to use an advanced graphics suite. Boasting on stage that Affinity is free forever only to spin 180 and go the subscription route in a year or two, like many are worried about, would be horribly short sighted decision leading to substantial reputational harm.

"They already broke their pledge"

Let's take a look at their original four points they released.

Fair Pricing.

Check. Affinity is now free for the life of the product, future updates and all. Contrary to the comments floating around online, according to Canva once activated can be used offline for extended periods of time (up to one year). The tradeoff being a required Canva account, which is practically inevitable after an acquisition anyways; I would say that counts as fair and affordable.

Accelerating Affinity.

With nothing major changing for almost a year with Affinity's V2 products we've clearly found where their focus has been. Unifying everything into a single app allows for a simpler learning curve for new adopters and likely helps speed up the release cycle minimizing the number of apps needing to be distributed across platforms.

Accessible for All.

They've gone above and beyond from their initial pledge here and are giving it to everyone.

Community Led.

The best example I can give is Will Paterson saying he had been testing and giving feedback for around 6 months. I think there's still room to grow in this area, but with how much they've been trying to correct the uninformed takes and theories, they have clearly been trying to put the worry to rest.

My thoughts.

It's not my first time being part of the Canva ecosystem. I signed my church up for their free non-profit account and have used them for the better part of 3 years now. It's not my preference and as someone with a more advanced skillset I often hit limits that don't make sense to me, like having to select multiple objects to export a separate PNG. However, if the Affinity community could collectively take off their tinfoil hats for a second, this is likely the best outcome after Serif got acquired. They had 90 employees at the time of acquisition, it is unrealistic for a company of that size with a niche product to survive off one time purchases for an extended period of time. That often leads to shorter life cycles of major versions and leads to holding back development of big improvements to add more to their change log.

Canva is making a big bet that this will raise the user base substantially from the 3 million Affinity had at the time of acquisition; slightly more than 1% of Canva's 220 million MAU. Allowing them to justify more resources to developing it, make them a real competitor to parts of Adobe (especially with younger individuals still dipping their toes into design), and in return this gets Canva more subscribers either through their optional Al additions to Affinity or individuals/businesses wanting to use the rest of the vast range of products and services Canva offers.

"Is there a catch?"

Yep, it's the long game. If they take enough of a bite out of Adobe's revenue and user base maybe they'll survive long enough to become a legitimate player in the space... or they'll go public/get pressured endlessly by private equity for more profits, layoff a ton of their staff and become one of an ever growing list of companies that made something great and ruined it for a one off boost in quarterly profit.

Only time will tell.