Dylan Field: “Design is the new code,” as Canva makes Affinity free and charges for the AI
Canva offers Affinity for iPad free, charging $18/month for AI features, shifting team costs and tool consolidation strategies in creative workflows.
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief,
A lot moved in the creative tool space this month, and it changes the math on what your team pays for and what it gets for free. Canva made a full pro suite free on iPad. Instagram and Adobe both bolted editing and AI onto apps they want on more screens. Figma is betting that design, not code, is what sets work apart now. Let me catch you up.
The deep cut
- Free tools buy you, then charge for the AI. Affinity for iPad costs nothing until you want Canva AI Studio at $18 a month.
- Growth apps follow creators to the bigger screen. Instagram put Edits on Mac because, as Brett Westervelt put it, projects "get too big for your phone."
- Design is the differentiator when anyone can ship code. Dylan Field's bet is that AI lowers the floor while people raise the ceiling.
The suite that costs nothing until the AI does
Canva put the whole Affinity suite on iPad for free. Sketch, vector, photo editing, and layout all live in one .af file, so your team stops bouncing between four apps and re-exporting at every step. The desktop version pulled more than seven million sign-ups in a year, so the free play is working.
Read the pricing carefully. The core tools are free with a Canva account. The AI features, Generative Expand, upscaling, Decompose Layer, sit behind Canva Pro at $18 a month. When Canva bought Serif in 2024, users feared a forced subscription. That did not happen, but the AI is where the money now lives.
The apps chasing you to the desktop
Instagram brought Edits to Mac, aimed straight at ByteDance's CapCut, which has owned desktop since 2021. The desktop version adds a multi-track timeline, color grading, keyframes, and watermark-free 4K exports. You can also plug in any AI agent through an MCP, point it at a folder of clips, and get a rough cut to refine by hand.
Adobe is working the same trend from the audio side, pairing Premiere mobile with Universal and Warner to drop licensed tracks straight into edits. Both moves chase the same creators, and both want to be the default before you pick a paid tier.
The bet that design beats code
Figma's Dylan Field made the sharpest claim of the month. AI lowers the floor on production, so code is no longer the hard part. "Design is the new code," he said, the layer above, where a point of view decides whether work breaks through. He warns against letting AI think for you and pushes building with it, then reacting to what you do not like.
Watch what Figma ships against that line. Figma Weave chains AI outputs into reusable workflows, and the design agent takes context and custom tools. The pitch is that generation is fine as long as you can shape the clay. For your team, that reframes the review: the AI draft is the starting point, not the deliverable.
The brand play hiding in a cartoon cat
Figma also put Hello Kitty and 15 Sanrio characters into FigJam for a week, with themed cursors, washi tape, and a New York pop-up. It is charm, but it is also retention. Figma's team reused the old FigPals framework to build it fast, and tied the whole thing to its multiplayer story.
The lesson for a leader is less about Hello Kitty and more about stickiness. Canva, Instagram, Adobe, and Figma are all fighting to be the place your team opens first. Delight, free tiers, and license deals are how they lock that in before the paid upsell arrives.
Three questions for your team
- Where are we paying for AI features we could get free in Affinity, and what would it cost to consolidate four tools into one?
- If design is now the differentiator, does our review process judge the AI draft or the point of view on top of it?
- Which editing tool do our creators actually open first, and are we standardizing on it or fighting it?
