So today we finally got to see what Affinity had been teasing for all of October, a launch so big that they stopped people from buying their own product for the entire month, promising "true creative freedom"

And I'll admit, when they first lifted the veil, I was frustrated. It felt like a slap in the face to professionals who had spent thousands of hours in the suite, and selling it to others out of good faith.

Initial impressions.

The first thing that many people, myself included, saw was that Affinity was now one app, and that it was free for everybody. No catches, no subscriptions, just freedom.

One app made a lot of sense but didn't feel progressive - the programs already felt very similar, and Publisher already had a feature where you could link in tools from other apps.

Free is where a lot of people quickly became skeptical, and rightly so - in today's society things are rarely free, even less so at a professional level. It either wasn't going to be free forever, or was making you the product.

I sat with this, frustrated and wracking my brain trying to figure out why they'd do this, what the motive was. Eventually I came to the conclusion that was later proven true, that Affinity is doing an inverse of Davinci Resolve - offer amazing free tools to professionals to make incredibly good stuff, then have the pros use it for seamless handoffs to teams in Canva, which they canh then make money off independently.

But there was so much more.

In all this noise of free, a lot was brushed over.

Affinity 3 adds tonnes of the features pros have been begging for. Vector trace, mesh gradients, hatch patterns, and tonnes more. All of this wasn't mentioned on socials once and was hidden away in a Discord server.

This list is PACKED, and really should have been mentioned somewhere. Had they have lead with "Hey, we added all the features you were begging for, a bunch you weren't, and you don't have to pay a dime for it" - the conversation likely would have been very different.

Naturally, the skepticism led to a lot of backlash and scrutiny from the community. My condolences to the team for having to respond out to all of that, but I feel like they did a solid job handling it a few hours in once the worst of the storm had passed.

But the real question, is it good?

Yes. Very.

It's certainly an adjustment even coming from V2, but things still feel natural, the flow still makes sense, and there's plenty of nice intuitive quality of life changes across the board. It's still snappy as ever, and while they did add AI, you can remove every single trace of it in two clicks, and nothing you make trains their models, ever.

There are a few glitches at launch, but they are incredibly minor and it's still incredibly polished software. It feels surreal to have something this powerful for free.

All the best features from previous versions are here too, including PANTONE swatches - something you have to pay for in Illustrator.

Conclusion

The new Affinity is a bold change of pace for the design industry, and a strong signal that Affinity is here to stay. It was a polarizing and alienating change at first, and I absolutely believe it should have been communicated better. Being as honest as they are about AI is very nice as well. Upfront, not overly glazing about it, and nothing is used as training data. All in all I am optimistic for their business model, and I trust that they'll stay true to their word.