I think a lot of commentor here forget that Canva is a large, profitable company that has a long track record of putting its consumers first. I'm not going to pretend that the fruit won't ever sour, but a company that wants to get more people in design, upsell them on fremium optional features, and has other profitable businesses to support the funnel is a hell of a lot better than Adobe.
If Serif was going to be acquired, I can't think of a better company to have done it.
I've been using the affinity suite since v1 for nearly a decade. Upgraded to v2 when that came out, and use it weekly on my iPad and Desktop. I was warry of Canva for a while, but my wife really got into it for designing and printing signage, invitations, and cards for our wedding. She's a light prosumer, and seeing her be able to create some really awesome stuff and fuel her creativity made me quite happy. Well worth the $15/m for pro to see her smile and be proud of herself.
I was worried when they bought Serif, but this new Affinity gives me hope. Canva makes good design products but they've been missing from the pro market. We all know Adobe runs that arena, and that most consumers are sick of their business practices. Canva is probably the best company positioned right now to compete with Adobe, and they have a huge incentive to bring users over. Keeping the base app free while enabling an optional subscriptions for the only remote component with operating costs lets Canva keep their top level funnel wide open. Even if most users don't pay for AI, that's still a huge number of people in the Canva ecosystem.
Of all the companies to buy Serif, Canva is probably the best case scenario.
We talk about what it's like to write the default language server for an entire language, Zig's unique take on community, and what it's like to hit it "big" in open source.