A good video to talk and watch : why affinity designer got free ? (is this a good model business ‘some company’ needs to follow ?) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9YR9KeCJDY
Again, everyone forgets that Canva has a print service. The more people they get to sign up, the more that will likely pay for print services.
“Some Company” doesn’t have that business model.
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Can’t wait to see the crap that spits out. Vista print is bad enough. Between quality of paper, print quality, and trimming.
Let alone gang printing they won’t pull it for print errors.
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Kinda more like Signs365. A lot of people seem to use that one too.
Which, even though you upload vector PDFs, they print as raster prints. 
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Lol! PrintDriver!
I used to work at Signs365 about 11 years ago!
I was the graphics supervisor there and told them about their flaws with their “batch processing” software!
They didn’t like what I had to say and let me go soon afterwards…
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I understand the business model, but I don’t like the decline of the incentive structure regarding the app developers.
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Hi there ! to be sincere, I created this post because how is going to be the reaction and I am curious, is a good business model “to be free ?” or is is called as “Freemium” ?
Hardly free. The software itself might be free to download and use, but the real costs show up elsewhere in the AI features, the print services, and all the other paid add-ons that sit behind the “free” gateway.
But there’s a bigger issue here than just money. By making the barrier to entry so low, you open the door for anyone to start editing and publishing designs regardless of skill or understanding of design principles. That’s great for accessibility, but it also means a wave of brand dilution, inconsistent assets, design errors, and a general loss of control for businesses that rely on a cohesive visual identity.
When everything is “free,” it becomes a free-for-all from unqualified designers offering “professional” work, to people freestyling brand materials with no oversight. It might look like democratisation on the surface, but in the long run it can devalue design as a craft and create chaos for companies trying to maintain professional standards.
And that’s the real cost of freemium software.
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Yes true, you can see on that, I was checking fora saying as “Cheap (free in this case) is expensive !”. But the true is that a designer is not made by his titles, his degrees or anything else. It is more base on his/her experience, his/her skills and his/her portfolio.
I’ve only recently stopped driving myself crazy over color, color spaces, image profiles and basic disregard for brand guidelines. Sure, I’ll point it out to the designers, but when I get the email back saying “just print it” that email gets archived for future reference when things don’t turn out quite as intended.
Design as a craft started dying well over a decade ago. It’s more best described as a “side hustle” for anyone with a computer and the ability to drag and drop stuff on a monitor.
The top notch designers still out there should come up with a new name for their profession to differentiate themselves from the chaff.
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It’s been like that for some time.
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Well thats true. But now its free. Before it was supposed to be paid.
But i know people use other free and also cracked.
But i just feel with affinity giving it for free is setting it even lower.
@PrintDriver has a point maybe professional designers should have a different titlle.
But the industry is not even standard across the board.
I’d be going to the police if i dropped my car to the mechanic and found out they used stolen parts.
People in general don’t regard the industry at a professional service.
Nearly 30 years in, and people still won’t pay what the service is worth.
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I stopped calling myself a graphic designer years ago. I mostly use the term designer or one of the more familiar job titles I’ve had. When people ask me what I designed or directed, I tell them. The word graphic stays out of the conversation.
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Honestly, I sort of cringe on the inside when someone asks what I do. The conversation usually goes something like this:
“What do you do?”
“I’m a graphic designer.”
“Oh, that’s cool.”
“Well, it used to be cool."
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Earlier on in my career it was a godsend.
“What do you do?”
”I’m a male stripper.”
I lost quite a few nosy friends.
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