Affinity Publisher, Photo, and Designer provide most of the functionality of Adobe inDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Mostly. The Affinity programs have always had quirks. Frequent backups are a good idea, if you catch my drift, but the Affinity suite is highly effective.

How effective?

First, they weren’t sold as subscriptions. Before they were yanked from distribution, you could get all three for less than $200, one time. I got mine long ago on a half-price sale, all three for $75.

Adobe’s mutli-app license is about $70 per month. In four years of using Affinity, I’ve been able to produce the same reports and brochures I would have created with Adobe while saving enough to buy the M4 Pro Mac Mini I’m using to write this essay.

Which isn’t really a truthful statement. I also saved enough to get the little Macbook I’m thinking about ordering plus quite a few pizzas.

Wonderful. I love pizza, and yet I find I’m looking for stable publishing alternatives. I don’t have problems with the software. It’s Affinity’s management that needs debugging.

This week, Affinity’s parent company, Canva, announced their active and friendly user community forums will block new posts starting on October 6. They will remain online as a read-only, stagnating reference, replaced by a Discord server.

Affinity’s new Discord is more like a noisy sports bar than a thoughtful discussion venue.

For a more accurate picture, imagine a barrel with comfortable accommodations for three or four monkeys. Stuff a half dozen into it and give the barrel a vigorous shake.

That would roughly match the tintinnabulation currently found in Affinity’s Discord. A once vibrant and helpful community is in jeopardy.

Next up, Affinity announced a wonderful new generation of creative freedom without any details of what that will be.

Part of that freedom includes barracading their online store. Affinity closed their online sales for the month of October. You can’t buy their products this month. It looks a little like how East Berlin enjoyed freedom from the West, courtesy barbed wire and guard towers.

Whatever Affinity is doing, they want to do so without a month’s revenue. If you want to buy more Affinity software, loyal fan, forget it for now. Go kick rocks.

You can’t buy the software and Affinity isn’t saying what’s coming next. In Texas, we call that a pig in a poke. Adobe calls it good news.

Some of that tintinnabulation in Affinity’s Discord comes from teams who have signed on new members and need to expand their license counts. Very sad. New licenses aren’t available this month.

Others are saying they started projects with Affinity’s 14 day free trial, love the software, and need to buy it to complete their work. Not going to happen, not until All Hallows Eve.

No sales, no trial period extensions, no exceptions.

Those willing customers have only one choice (other than Adobe). Hold their breaths until the end of the month in hopes the October surprise is a treat, not a trick. Teams with projects in flight and insufficient license count can just bench new employees for a month, I suppose.

It’s an amazing thing to see. It’s even more amazing to see Adobe capitalize on Affinity’s marketing incompetence while Adobe stays on course to become the next Quark. Nobody seems to learn.

Remember Quark? It’s still around. In the 90’s, QuarkXPress was the industry standard for electronic publishing, particularly for newspapers and magazines. These days it’s a bit player.

Adobe disrupted Quark’s customer base and dominated publishing. Then Adobe became Adobe with pricing that ruled out the huge casual use market.

That opened the door for Affinity to do what Affinity has been doing up until now, disrupting Adobe’s market.

Whether or not that will continue may be answered this Halloween when Affinity’s parent company, Canva, announces whatever redefinition of creative freedom they have in planning.

There are several key points worth observing.

Canva is comfortable with impacting business expansion and projects in flight. Your licensed right to use Affinity software is not as strong as it should be, at least in edge cases.

It might be wise to remain aware of the possibility of service interruption. I’m not sure how a license would be restored right now if you had to buy a new computer. Affinity desktop software has vanished from app stores. Android and iOS versions of Affinity were still available as of earlier today, selling for zero dollars. Some speculate that’s an error not long to be left uncorrected.

It’s a painful situation. It’s more painful to learn by your own mistakes than the pratfalls of others, so let’s look at some business concepts Affinity doesn’t seem to recognize.

No CEO should feel at liberty to run the business any darn way he wants. Customer wants and needs drive marketing in most cases. Every once in a while you can make a killing shipping coal to Newcastle. Most times, better align your operations with your customers.

Lewis Kornfeld wrote of his days as Radio Shack President and his marketing philosophy in a book called “To Catch A Mouse Make A Noise Like A Cheese,” a fantastic title. A company has to respect its customers. Keeping them unsettled and in the dark won’t work.

There’s a limit to how far you can go, of course. If you can’t honorably give your market what they want, find a different market. Don’t sell your soul, sell a good product.

Customers drive marketing. In turn, marketing drives management. The CEO may sign the paychecks and set breakroom refrigerator policy but he can’t violate marketing dictates from his customers.

Not unless he wants to turn his company into what appears could be Affinity’s fate. Customers are more important than stockholders, in fact.

A market can exist without a company serving it. A company can’t exist without the support of a market. Many companies exist without stockholders. Stockholders don’t exist without companies that don’t exist without customers. It’s a little like that old Reagan-era TV ad.

This is your brain. Splat, sizzle. This is your brain on drugs.

Your company without customers is exactly like that but without any sizzle. It just won’t be there.

Right now, Affinity is leaving its customers in uncertainty. What once seemed like safe territory, the comfortable workspace of an Affinity product, is no longer inviting.

If all that sounds like too much blue sky reasoning, the overriding principle I kept foremost every day when I ran my business was that money and services, like water, run downhill.

For instance, you might offer a free trial to get customers started right away. You wouldn’t, barring absolute incompetence, tell customers to keep their stinkin’ money and that you’ll get around to them in a month.

It’s far better to establish an easy path for your customers to adopt your products.

At the same time, you want the customer’s money to follow a gentle slide into the company’s bank account. That’s mostly done with customer support and value for the price, which is where Affinity excelled.

Provide a product customers will find worthwhile. Control your costs so revenue makes it worth your while to provide the product. It’s downhill both ways. In this case, downhill is a good thing.

Any barriers in either direction hurt the company as well as customers.

Affinity had the value. It had the support of an enthusiastic user community and great support staff. Unfortunately, at least for the moment, Affinity management has other ideas.

It’s also true there may be other reasons behind Affinity’s destructive course. Perhaps there is a looming patent infringment accusation. Something like that could inspire lawyers to immediately pull the plug. Maybe a forgotten intellectual property agreement expires this week.

Whatever transpires with Canva’s Halloween trick or treat reveal, Affinity’s customers are in for a surprise. Let’s hope it’s a nice one.

Has Affinity become a ghost story? I’d like to hear your opinion. Leave a comment by the dark of night or tell me to howl at the Moon via carl@carlhaddick.com.

I’m happily employed as of this writing and hopefully that won’t change. Should the creak of a hidden trap door change my fate, keep me in mind if you need a little common sense in your organization. I’ve got some to spare.

Many thanks to Pixabay’s Vojtěch Kučera for the image of a Canon staring down a cannon. It seemed the perfect image for independent publishers in a standoff with inscrutable corporate interests. A hat-tip as well to Pixabay’s Ray_Shrewsberry whose epicurean art lent a great photographic analogy for one’s brains – or one’s company – on drugs.