Clearly it will be insanely hard to compete with Illustrator. It’s a brand name and industry standard.
But if you can convince enough people that they can get a pretty good approximation of Illustrator for a fraction of the price (and you adjust your rate of shipping features accordingly), that can be a great business model.
One company I worked for had one laptop with Creative Cloud shared between an entire department because they couldn’t justify getting everyone CC just for occasional use.
When I pointed out what good value Affinity was, they promptly rolled it out for the entire organisation.
The thread has since been deleted.
Sketch has delivered on a lot of things, but I do not think their business model is root cause of their success.
I don’t want cloud only software. Do you want to offer syncing? Use my Dropbox or iCloud for that. You want some shared library? Use my Dropbox of iCloud for that.
Give ME control over MY assets and don’t take my work hostage.
Plus, if you stop paying the subscription you potentially lose access to your files. Yes, there’s a generous free tier, but that’s essentially VC funded at the moment. There’s no guarantee that will last forever, especially if they need to actually make some money.
At least with Sketch the file format is well understood and you can keep using whatever version you end up with when your licence expires.
Because of this, I've spent a lot of time reading about why people choose Figma, and the reasoning is simply that they value working together more efficiently more than they value data ownership.
There are a few interesting take-aways that come from that observation:
1. Over time, there might be a divide with file-based apps for personal use on one side, and web apps for group use on the other (we're probably already here outside of some areas, like video editing and programming, where people still collaborate by editing files).
2. Even for the file-based apps, outside of expert users, it's actually probably preferable for most users to use a web-based app and take their risks with the company behind it, rather than keep track of those files themselves. E.g., picture users with no backup strategy, and all their files on one computer in their house. For these users, dealing with the future of Figma is probably safer than them keeping track of their files themselves.
3. Another fascinating angle here is that programming ends up side stepping all these trade-offs entirely, just because of version control (which is facilitated by plain text file formats), which solves both problems simultaneously (collaboration and offsite backups). Version control, and by extension plain text, are such powerful concepts that they end up splintering off programming from the trajectory the rest of the software industry is on.
You’re right. Individually, files stored in Figma probably are a lot safer than on a hard drive that’s never been backed up. Organisations should probably think hard though.
Sketch files are basically a bundle of zipped JSON files and image assets, lending themselves quite nicely to version control.
Abstract, for example, is a nice UI layer over Git and neatly adds versioning, collaboration, and developer hand off to Sketch.
For me, this is the #1 issue with the recent trend for subscription models. I do think a lot of these firms are price gouging as well, but even if they weren't, it's just too much risk that something we depend on to do our work might be changed or even entirely discontinued if the business running it changes its mind or fails.
I've had salespeople straight-up promise me that X or Y software company is far too big to fail and will be around forever. I've also seen enough big name tech companies fail over the years to know what that promise is worth.
We would rather stick with old versions of the big name titles, or use alternatives like the Affinity suite or Sketch where you have your copy and it really is yours, than jump on that bandwagon. I've had salespeople tell me that this is a liability, and that everyone else is moving on and our software won't be compatible with the new file formats or other such excuses. To date, the number of times we have been seriously stung by that since the likes of Adobe went subscription-only is zero, and the number of cases where it's caused a bit of inconvenience but we worked around it without too much trouble is I think one, so I'm willing to take my chances.
Assumption #1: Design documents are contained in a file, and that file should be portable.
Tools like Figma are closer in nature to SaaS products than they are to native, file-based, raster editing softwares like Photoshop. You don't expect to be able to export your Slack workspace into a file and import it into another tool. You expect to have a means of migrating that data, potentially by exporting that data into a common format (e.g. JSON, CSV), transforming it into a format compatible with the target, and then either importing it using a provided tool or an API.
Assumption #2: Design tools all work similarly enough that document structures are largely portable.
While UI modalities remain similar enough on the surface, the underlying capabilities that produce the visual are exceedingly different. Look at type, for example—even Sketch and Figma, which are similar conceptually and of the same era, render type so differently that even robust import/migrate tools fail to capture the position of text within a few pixels for even basic, single-line, single-style text. Notions of seamlessly switching between tools disregards the real-world complexity of fonts, color profiles, raster manipulations, version history, comments, plugin-generated metadata, symbols/components, and more.
Assumption #3: There's no way to export a Figma document.
You can get the entire document structure from Figma via the API. This is the same data the viewer uses to render the document. You do not need to understand the internals of the .fig files.
1. what if I want to switch platforms?
2. what if they switch business models?
3. what if they go away?
The only real concern is #1 with Sketch, and that's your (org's) choice so you do have some choice in the matter. Since the format is well-documented there's ways to move away if #2 and you still have access to existing software with #3 (save issues with a licensing server perhaps).
Figma is a concern with all three unfortunately. Everything I see about its capabilities is amazing, but I've resisted for this reason. Hopefully they open their format.
Having said that, there are windows apps that can work with sketch files. For example https://icons8.com/lunacy
> Give ME control over MY assets and don’t take my work hostage.
Ah, but Adobe is enterprise software (enterprises of creative talent, yes, but still enterprises.) Enterprises don't want their employees keeping things in their personal cloud storage. They want enterprise-controlled cloud storage with ACLs on every step. They want your experience of making a layout to closely resemble the experience of a journalist writing+revising+publishing a story through their enterprise's CMS: a workflow where everything is actually a (perhaps automatically) requested-and-then-granted permission that can be audited and metric-tracked in the middle.
Mostly, this is because this approach allows the enterprise to know how much to pay out in IP license fees. Your Dropbox storage—even if it's Dropbox for Teams—isn't going to let them query out the set of status=delivered projects that have ownership=external assets linked to them.
You can't really sell this sort of thing as non-cloud software, unless you're selling an on-prem Asset Management Server to go along with your on-the-workstation software. (As many enterprise B2B companies used to do!)
One thing that could "fix" this is if an enterprise cloud storage provider (e.g. Box) offered the ability for other B2B SaaS providers to create deep "plugin" functionality for their system, such that your Box storage could contain Adobe assets that were ACLed, linked, and tracked (by callbacks from Box's servers to Adobe's servers) just as they are in Adobe's cloud. But until that happens, I don't see any other solution being practical for enterprise customers.
There are any number of reasons feature updates might be coming more slowly than is ideal. As I'm sure everyone here is well aware, throwing more money at a development team doesn't necessarily make it faster.
But it does, especially over a multi-year timespan. Unless you really screw up in managing or hiring.
Assuming you hire reasonably skilled engineers and accept that they will take some time to integrate with the team (and that this will temporarily slow the team) then eventually you can build more stuff in any window of time.
For reference, see almost every software company.
> For reference, see almost every software company.
Like Apple, who has had to delay stuff meant for a .0 release to a .x update, a few times? Or Microsoft or Google who kill projects outright and still can’t decide which API to settle on?
Or Facebook etc. who took months to implement Dark Mode?
FYI, you can view their accounts on the UK's Companies House website: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05041038/filing-h...
Like you eluded to IMO they should just do the traditional thing, charge for upgrades?
Not trying to nit-pick on spelling, but they're very different words -- and HN has many readers for whom English is not native. HTH
They’ve erred on the other end of the spectrum from Adobe. Rather than get greedy and force users into renting their software as Adobe has, they’ve tried to stretch out a very low price of entry into a multi-year series of free updates – and it’s not working.
I paid a mere $50 for Affinity Designer half a decade ago. While it’s seen some valuable updates since then, the core promise of an Illustrator killer remains out of reach: Key features like blends, pattern brushes, distortion envelopes, and more have sat on the 1.x roadmap for years, and the marquee feature of 1.8, released a few weeks ago, was a years-in-the-making bugfix for the expand stroke feature.
I want to give Serif more money so they can bring Designer up to speed with Illustrator, as fifty dollars every 5+ years clearly doesn’t support the kind of development effort this requires. I don’t want to subscribe to Designer either, but there are other proven models: Look at Sketch, which has an optional, annual upgrade program, and has shipped vastly more functionality than Designer has in the same time period.
My criticism isn’t entirely fair as Serif has also been occupied with launching Photo and Publisher during this time, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that Designer has stagnated. I really hope the company finds the right course correction that keeps the Affinity range affordable while sustainably funding development.