When I was 20 years old, I remember the big problem with design software – the things you need to survive as a professional often cost more than a month’s rent.
Today, with a restart your Affinity suite In a free product, Canva seems ready to change that model completely.
But let’s take a second to remember how bad things used to be for beginning designers. When I graduated from college, a magazine review of the original Adobe Creative Suite put the price of the software at $1,229 (or $2,155 today), which was more than an entry-level iBook ($1,099, or $1,927 today). Sure, there was a big educational discount for students like me, but there was a simple reason it cost so much: because the number of designers was relatively small.
Technically, there are more than ever, according to Adobe’s own numbers (as of last year, 37 million people subscribed to Creative Cloud, which is still more than Canva 24 million paid users. But the truth is, many of those 37 million people probably don’t need it: They subscribe to Creative Cloud through their employer, who probably got a wholesale rate for the software. Those people might be editing a copy for print, or need to view PDF files, or edit the occasional image or video.
But what if Canva’s lodestar isn’t Adobe, but Microsoft Office?
A great prize for a free product.
Canva’s bet: normies outnumber power users by 6 times (or more)
To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You can buy it for a department, such as your video equipment, your web equipment, or your printing equipment. But there are a lot of other people in your office and they need design too. They need to create social posts and presentations, email signatures, and graphic work that their $150,000-a-year senior designer doesn’t have time for.
Canva is well suited for those smaller tasks, which is why they’ve convinced 24 million people to pay $120 a year or more for their offering, many of them in workplaces. However, Canva Pro could be almost as popular as Microsoft 365, which has a estimated 440 million paid subscribers. The pitch to employers: Instead of buying graphics software for one or two departments, everyone gets a subscription to Canva Pro.
If only the market wasn’t so divided due to all the professionals favoring Creative Cloud and despising Canva.
That’s where the logic of making Affinity free comes into play. For years, Adobe’s Achilles’ heel has been its overwhelmingly high cost, which has left many freelance or early-career professional designers feeling sustained shock, year after year. (The AI generative bug, which still stings a year later, didn’t help.) Besides the fact that it was a huge burden on startups, it also deterred interested designers from diving in, all because the margin needed to be protected at all costs.
Aiming to convince even the accounting team of the value of easy-to-use design software, Canva is betting that by neutralizing end users (the power users who complain a lot) they can get more standards.
The AI paywall in the new Affinity, as much as you hear people complain about it, is the way they thread the needle.
Look, Affinity power users have made it clear that they largely don’t want AI. Good. But, love it or hate it, it’s basically a fact that a big tech product will need AI in 2025. That’s not because of users, but because of Wall Street. (Yes, I hate it too, but that’s what an AI bubble does to people’s brains.)
So Affinity’s strategy is to minimize the impact on its product. Combined the features of AI. that people might not hate (like easier cropping or increased resolution) with the nifty generatives that appeal to the stock market. That ensures that some will buy. For those who don’t, you’ll be buried behind a paywall that people can easily ignore; Most likely, their bosses (Canva clients In fact care) will continue to pay the cut.
At $99.99 per month per user for its Creative Cloud Pro plan, Adobe charges its enterprise customers 6 times more than Canva, which charges $200 per year per user for its enterprise plan. If Canva can get more than 6 standards for every professional Adobe serves, it will come out ahead. Also, it solves another problem, as Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson said fast company:
So how does a free professional tool make business sense for Canva? Adams explains it to me with a simple mantra: “craft and scale.” High-end, pixel-perfect “craftsmanship” happens in Affinity Studio. “Scaling,” where that craft is used to generate massive amounts of content, happens at Canva. By making the crafting tool free, Canva is betting it can grow the entire design ecosystem.
The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds. For enterprise teams, this is the end. “Senior designers or the creative team within a company [will be] They use Affinity to create all of their brand assets, their templates,” Hewson explains. “But then they load them all into Canva seamlessly so that the rest of the teams within the company, who are not expert designers, can scale that.”
It is a reflection that everyone is a graphic designer and that Adobe’s attempt to artificially enter the market no longer makes sense. Sure, Adobe has its Express suite, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about it? Those people talk about Canva.
Canva just turned 40 years of design business logic on its head, and if they pull it off, they look like geniuses. If they don’t, hopefully Affinity won’t get lost in the shuffle.
As for the software itself, the decision to combine the applications (illustration, pixel editing, and publishing) seems like a stroke of genius. Part of what makes Adobe so complicated to use is that you have to keep switching between applications. With Affinity, there are no changes or failures. You simply upload your file and if you want a vector drawing, you add it. Do you want to place some text or a photo? Just add that.
No, there is no version for Linux. Yes, it’s one of the best-running professional-grade applications I’ve used with Wine. (This guide helps.) So those fairly vocal Linux users will probably be happy too.
A year and a half ago I wrote an optimistic take on what Canva was doing with Affinity. I think there are reasons to be nervous, but this strategy seems correct. Instead of feeling stifled by your power users, you’ve turned those power users into loss leaders. Typically, it is the low-end users who lead the losses.
Fortunately, Canva knows how to manipulate an image.
