I really hope the company finds the right course correction that keeps the Affinity range affordable while sustainably funding development. 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 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. 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. 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 paid a mere $50 for Affinity Designer half a decade ago. 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. ![]() ![]() They’ve erred on the other end of the spectrum from Adobe. Affinity Designer is an excellent piece of professional creative software, but Serif’s business model is broken.
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