When the design-tool giant Canva snapped up Serif, the beloved parent company of the Affinity suite, in March 2024, the creative community held its breath. The collective fear was palpable: Would the scrappy, affordable, one-time-purchase darling of the design world be slowly suffocated by the subscription model that made Adobe a goliath and Canva a $26 billion behemoth?

For months, designers, illustrators, and photographers who had built their careers on Affinity’s subscription-free promise waited for the other shoe to drop. That shoe finally fell just days ago, on October 29, 2025.

But it wasn’t the shoe anyone expected.

Canva didn’t just announce a new version. It completely upended its own business model and fired a direct, devastating shot at Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The new Affinity isn’t a V3 upgrade; it’s a single, all-in-one application that merges Photo, Designer, and Publisher.

And it is, as Canva is stressing in every piece of marketing it can find, “free forever.”

The end of an era, the start of a gamble

Let’s rewind. For the better part of a decade, Affinity built a fiercely loyal following by being the “anti-Adobe.” Its three flagship apps—Affinity Designer (for vector illustration), Affinity Photo (for photo editing), and Affinity Publisher (for page layout)—were fast, powerful, and, most importantly, available for a single, flat fee of around $70 each. You bought it, you owned it. In a world of never-ending monthly payments for Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Affinity was a sanctuary.

When Canva acquired the company, it immediately issued a “pledge” to the community, promising, among other things, that perpetual licenses would always be offered. Still, the community was skeptical. In early October 2025, when the V2 editions of the software were suddenly pulled from the Affinity website, that skepticism turned to dread. Everyone braced for a forced subscription.

Instead, Canva chose a different path. The new, unified “Affinity by Canva” platform isn’t a subscription. It isn’t a one-time purchase. It’s just… free.

Available right now for Windows and Mac (with an iPad version slated for 2026), the new app consolidates all three previous programs into one streamlined interface. Users can seamlessly toggle between vector, pixel, and layout tools, all while working on a “one universal file type.” It’s the seamless, integrated workflow that many designers have dreamed of.

So, what’s the catch? Because in 2025, there is always a catch.

The “free” app and the AI paywall

The catch, it turns out, isn’t in the professional tools. The catch is in the artificial intelligence.

The new Affinity platform is, by all accounts, a fully-featured, professional-grade design suite available at no cost. You can download it, create a free Canva account to activate it, and use its powerful vector, photo, and layout tools without ever paying a dime.

The monetization comes from the new Canva AI Studio built directly into the Affinity interface.

Want to use new AI-powered tools like Generative Fill, Expand & Edit, or instant Background Removal? For that, you’ll need to be a Canva Pro subscriber, which runs about $119.99 a year.

This is the new strategy, laid bare. Canva isn’t trying to sell you a design app. It’s giving you a world-class, professional design app for free, betting that the convenience of integrated AI will be compelling enough to make you subscribe to its wider ecosystem. It’s a Trojan horse, but instead of soldiers, it’s filled with generative AI features.

This is a clever way to sidestep the subscription-fatigue controversy while simultaneously trying to normalize AI tools as a “premium” add-on for professionals. For creatives who oppose the technology, they can simply ignore the AI-powered buttons and use the robust, free software without interruption.

What happens to the old guard?

This move also clarifies the future for the loyal users who built Affinity in the first place. If you previously purchased the V2 editions of Designer, Photo, or Publisher, your software will continue to work. You own it.

However, Canva has confirmed that those standalone V2 apps are now legacy products. They will no longer be actively maintained or receive future support updates. Existing users aren’t being forced to move to the new platform, but the writing is on the wall: the future is the new, free, all-in-one app.

For the wider design world, this is a seismic shift. Canva is making an audacious gamble: that it can successfully convert a user base that famously hates subscriptions by giving them the core product for free and only charging for the cutting-edge (and controversial) AI extras.

It’s a move that gives Adobe a genuine-to-goodness nightmare, provides an incredible entry point for new designers, and positions Canva as the center of a new creative universe—one where the tools are free, but the “magic” will cost you.