i paid for my design software and then they made it free

There's a poster I made at the print shop in 2019 for our spring letterpress open house, and it's the thing I was proudest of from that era. Wood type, a bad photocopy of a fern, my first real margin. I set half of it by hand and rebuilt the other half in InDesign at 2am on the shop's sticky keyboard, and I've carried that .indd file through three computers like a relic.

This September, Affinity shipped version 3.3 with InDesign file import. So last week I sat down with my MacBook, found the file in a folder called OLD STUFF DO NOT DELETE, and opened it in a free app.

Seven years and one acquisition later, it opened.

Oh my god, the kerning. I stood up so fast that Mochi left the room.

the honest bit, or the best $83 i ever lost

Here's the confession with the full timeline, because it's the funniest money I've ever spent. Canva bought Serif, the company behind Affinity, in March 2024. That fall, in a half-off sale, I paid about $83 for the V2 Universal License, down from a list that had started at $169.99. I felt extremely smart about it. Owning software! Like a print person!

Then, on October 30 of last year, Canva relaunched the entire thing as one free app, and my license became a collector's item. Best $83 I ever lost. I mean that without a single drop of bitterness, which surprises even me, because the $83 bought me a year and a half of genuinely owning my layout software, and I'd pay it again.

At work I use the industry suite, and I'm not here to trash anyone's tools. This is the home copy. It's free. I keep waiting to wake up.

what it's actually like, eight months in

It's one app now, with three rooms. Designer, Photo and Publisher used to be three purchases. Now they're one download with Vector, Pixel and Layout studios, and you click between them at the top left like walking through a house. Layout is my home base, Vector is the hallway I run down when a logo needs rescuing, and Pixel is the room where I fix scans of wood type. The interface genuinely feels like rooms, not tabs.

The import took its time and then it was fine. Before 3.3 you had to bounce your InDesign files out to a format called IDML and hope. Now the .indd opens directly, after a pause long enough that I checked whether I'd actually clicked. My poster was type, rules and one fern, and it all survived the trip. Honest caveat: files built with fancier Adobe features don't come through perfectly, since some of those tools don't exist here. Mine was simple, so mine came home.

Free, with a Canva account attached. No card, no trial countdown. You make a Canva account, you sign in, you get the whole app plus a little cloud storage. The paid part is the AI: generative fill and expand, background removal, upscaling, sitting behind a Canva subscription at a price I saw reported between $15 and $18 a month. My MacBook could run all of it. I choose not to, and the free object-selection model in settings is honestly the only bit of machine cleverness I've wanted.

The questions people asked, answered plainly. A million people signed up in the first four days and the questions came with them. Will it stay free? Is this a $0 subscription, which is still a subscription? Will Canva train AI on my files? On that last one, Canva published a straight sentence saying Affinity work stays on your device and isn't used to train AI features, with a separate opt-in for usage data. I believe a company statement the way you believe a free sample, with an eye on the door. But eight months in, nothing inside the app has tried to sell me anything, except one welcome video at full volume, a settings fix, not a pattern.

What's missing, said plainly, because reviews should say it. There's no photo cataloging, so photographers who live in libraries of images still need another app. Editorial designers who rely on GREP will miss it. Some complex Photoshop mockups open with the artwork sitting crooked. And the iPad version is still promised as coming soon, with no date I'd bet on. For a layout gremlin making planner inserts, none of that bites me.

CMYK export, for the print kids in the back. The PDF export is comprehensive, it can flatten and keep CMYK color, and when I sent Dana K.'s save-the-dates to the copy shop, they came back the exact colors I designed. If you've never had a printer turn your teal into a swamp, this won't land. If you have, welcome.

the year i owned my software, briefly

Hear me out: I haven't owned layout software since I left the print shop. The shop owned its licenses. My student license died with my student email. Every design app I've used since has been a free tier with the real tools behind glass, which means I was renting the feeling of the job I used to have.

The $83 fixed that for a year and a half, then the free version fixed it better, and here's what I do with it now. I designed my own planner inserts. Planner number twelve, yes, twelve, a five-page A5 set with a Monday-start week grid and one habit row I will leave blank, because I have met myself. I set Dana K.'s save-the-dates for her June wedding here, and she texted me a photo of them taped to her fridge, no words, just the photo.

That's what the software is for, in my house. Not a startup, not a workflow. A fridge.

Okay so, one more thing about the poster. I printed it at 80 percent scale on the good paper and it's on the hallway wall, and I walk past it every morning on the way to the kettle.

I keep meaning to rebuild the shop's old business card file, for old times' sake, I found the font, probably, in a subfolder of DO NOT DELETE, and I opened it and

the soft landing

A free app opened a door I built when I was twenty-one and afraid of the future, and it didn't break anything walking through. The poster's up. The kerning held. Whatever happens to this software next, the girl at the sticky keyboard got her file back, and I think she'd be relieved to know it still opens.

• ava ✒️