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When I was 20, I remember the huge rub with design software: The stuff you needed to survive as a professional often costs more than a month of rent.

Today, with a reset of its Affinity suite into a free product, Canva appears ready to upend that model entirely.

But let’s take a second to remember just how bad things used to be for entry-level designers. Around the time I graduated from college, a magazine review of the original Adobe Creative Suite put the price of the software at $1,229 (or $2,155 today), which was more than an entry level iBook ($1,099, or $1,927 today). Sure, there was a large educational discount for students like me, but there was a simple reason it cost so much: Because the number of designers was relatively small.

Technically, there are more than ever, based on Adobe’s own numbers—as of last year, 37 million people subscribed to Creative Cloud, which is still more than Canva’s 24 million paid users. But the truth is that many of those 37 million people probably don’t need it—they’re subscribed to Creative Cloud through their employer, who likely got a bulk rate on the software. Those people might be editing copy for print, or need to view PDFs, or edit the occasional image or video.

But what if Canva’s North Star isn’t Adobe, but Microsoft Office?

Pretty big splash for a free product.

Canva’s bet: Normies outnumber power users by 6X (or more)

To explain what I mean: Let’s say you’re a company that subscribes to Adobe Creative Cloud. You might buy it for one department—like your video team, or your web team, or your print team. But there are a lot of other people in your office, and they need design too. They need to build social posts and presentations and email signatures and graphical work that your $150,000-per-year senior designer doesn’t have the time for.

Canva is well-suited for those smaller tasks, which is why they’ve convinced 24 million people to pay $120 per year or more for its offering, many in workplaces. Potentially, though, Canva Pro could be nearly as popular as Microsoft 365, which has an estimated 440 million paid subscribers. The pitch to employers: Rather than buying graphics software for one or two departments, everyone gets a Canva Pro subscription.

If only the market wasn’t so split because of all the professionals favoring Creative Cloud and looking down on Canva.

That’s where the make-Affinity-free logic comes into play. For years, Adobe’s Achilles heel has been its overwhelming high cost, which has left many early-career or freelance professional designers feeling sustained sticker shock, year after year. (The generative AI fumble, which still stings a year later, didn’t help.) On top of the fact that it was a huge burden on new businesses, it also discouraged interested designers from dipping their toes in, all because the margin needed to be protected at all costs.

With its sights on selling even the accounting team on the value of easy-to-use design software, Canva is betting that by neutralizing the top-end users—the power users who complain a lot—they can get more normies.

The AI paywall on the new Affinity, as much as I’m already hearing people complain about it, is how they thread the needle.

See, Affinity’s power users have made it loud and clear that they largely don’t want AI. Fine. But, love it or hate it, it’s basically a given that a big-tech product needs AI in 2025. That’s not because of users—that’s because of Wall Street. (Yes, I hate it too, but that’s what an AI bubble does to people’s brains.)

So Affinity’s strategy is to minimize the impact to its product. It combined the AI features that people might not hate—like easier cutouts or resolution upscaling—with the gimmicky generative ones that attract the stock market. That ensures some will buy. For the ones that won’t, they’ll bury it behind a paywall that people can easily ignore; odds are, their bosses (the customers Canva really cares about) will still pay the cut.

At $99.99 per month per user for its Creative Cloud Pro plan, Adobe charges its business customers 6 times as much as Canva, which charges $200/year per user for its business plan. If Canva can get more than 6 normies for every professional Adobe serves, they come out ahead. Plus, it solves another problem, as Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson told Fast Company:

So, how does a free professional tool make business sense for Canva? Adams explains it to me with a simple mantra: “craft and scale.” The high-end, pixel-perfect “craft” happens in Affinity Studio. The “scale”—where that craft is used to generate massive amounts of content—happens in Canva. By making the craft tool free, Canva is betting it can grow the entire design ecosystem.​

The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds. For enterprise teams, this is the endgame. “The high-end designers or the creative team within an enterprise [will be] using Affinity to create all of their brand assets, their templates,” Hewson explains. “But then they upload all of those to Canva seamlessly so the rest of the teams within the business, who are not skilled designers, can scale on that.”​

It’s a reflection that everyone is a graphic designer, and Adobe’s attempt to artificially gate the market doesn’t make sense anymore. Oh sure, Adobe has its Express suite, but when’s the last time you heard someone talking about it? Those people talk about Canva.

Canva just flipped 40 years of design-business logic on its head, and if they pull this off, they look like geniuses. If they don’t, hopefully Affinity doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

As for the software itself, the decision to combine the apps—illustration, pixel editing, and publishing—feels like a stroke of genius. Part of what makes Adobe such a pain to use is that you need to keep flip flopping between apps. With Affinity, there’s no flip or flop. You just load your file and if you want a vector drawing, you add it. Want to place some text or a photo? Just add that.

No, there isn’t a Linux version. Yes, it is one of the best-running professional-grade apps I’ve ever used with Wine. (This guide helps.) So those quite-vocal Linux users will be happy too, probably.

A year and a half ago I wrote an optimistic take on what Canva was doing with Affinity. I think that there is reason to be nervous, but this strategy feels right. Rather than feeling choked by its power users, it’s turned those power users into a loss leader. Usually, it’s the low-end users that are the loss leaders.

Fortunately, Canva knows how to manipulate an image.