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Re:Affinity Designer: A Love Story by leokennis on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:54PM (#22713855)
I don’t think their business model is broken, I think your expectations are wrong.

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.

Re:Affinity Designer: A Love Story by mattkevan on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:29PM (#22714086)
If you go for the volume licensing deal, that is an annual subscription, and it works out at about £13 per year per licence.

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.

Re:Affinity Designer: A Love Story by mortenjorck on Saturday March 28, 2020 @05:38PM (#22714507)
This is a fair counterpoint, as there may indeed have been a contraction in Serif’s ambitions for the product. But there’s ample evience that Affinity Designer has fallen short of Serif’s own expectations: A 2014 post on the official Affinity product forum laid out a public roadmap for the 1.x cycle, including such Illustrator staples as mesh warping, blends, gradient mesh fills, and more. Some of the original roadmap was indeed implemented, such as the critical feature of artboards. But as the originally-promised “two years of free updates” stretched into more than four, the majority went unaddressed.

The thread has since been deleted.