Is Affinity Free for Commercial Use? Terms Read

Is Affinity Free for Commercial Use? What the Terms Say

Yes, with conditions. Affinity by Canva costs nothing to download, and the Affinity Terms we read (last updated March 12, 2026) contain no clause that limits the software to non-commercial work. Use is tied to a Canva account, the licence is revocable, and Canva's own pages disagree on whether the free tier covers teams as well as individuals. Paid plans only matter for Canva's AI tools.

Software licences often carry a non-commercial clause, which is why the question is worth asking, and the search results for it mostly repeat that Affinity is free without quoting the licence. The licence is a stack of three documents: the Affinity Terms (updated March 12, 2026), Canva's Terms of Use (effective August 19, 2026) and Canva's Content License Agreement for the assets inside the app. A working designer needs four answers from them: can I bill a client for work made in it, who owns the files, what happens if Canva changes its mind, and what do I give up against a paid suite. We did not install or test the software, so compatibility claims below are the vendor's and labelled as such.

What the vendor says, page by page

The first thing the research turned up is that Canva's pages do not use identical words. Each row below is quoted from a page we read on October 23, 2026.

Read together, these say the desktop app is free and complete, and that you need a Canva account. The wording "for individuals" on the home page and "for everyone" in the launch post is the unresolved part. A sole trader billing clients is an individual under any ordinary reading. A five-person studio is a team, and the product pages route "organisations" to Canva Enterprise or Education for single sign-on, while also saying the free account works for everyone. If you are the team case, the safest path is to ask Canva in writing which route applies to you and keep the reply.

The licence, clause by clause

The binding text is the Affinity Terms, which supplement Canva's Terms of Use. We read the version dated March 12, 2026. The clauses that matter to commercial work are these, numbered as on the page.

Nothing in those clauses uses the words "non-commercial", "personal use only" or "educational use only" for the software itself. That absence is the answer to the literal question, with the caveat that the licence points to two other documents (Canva's Terms of Use and the Content License Agreement) which can contain further limits.

What the Terms of Use add

The Canva Terms of Use (effective August 19, 2026) say Affinity is part of the Services and that you may "download and use the Affinity Software... by logging in to the Affinity Software with your Canva account", subject to the Affinity Terms. The same section says that the sections titled "Printing your designs" and "Using Canva to Publish a Website" do not apply to the software. Two rules in the Terms of Use deserve a designer's attention:

• Restrictions on use of the Service. The list includes accessing the Service "for purposes of performance benchmarking" and "for purposes of building or marketing a competitive product". If you were planning to publish speed tests or to build a rival tool using the software, read that clause first. Ordinary client work is not in the list.
• Team accounts. The terms say that if you are on a Team, "the Team Owner or Administrator may control access to, delete, or re-assign ownership to the User Content you upload and Designs you create on the account you access as part of the Team." A freelancer who signs in to Affinity with a client's Canva Team account is working inside someone else's administrative control. Use your own account for your own files.

Who owns what you make

The Terms of Use say "as between you and Canva, you own all right, title and interest in and to your User Content", and the Affinity Terms (clause 15) say your content is under your "full control and responsibility". The launch coverage in Creative Bloq (dated November 6, 2025) quotes Canva's Cameron Adams: "We don't sell your data, we don't train AI features on your files, we don't monetise your creativity behind the scenes. Your work stays yours, always." The newsroom post separately says Canva AI features are "built with privacy and control in mind" so that work "is not used to train AI features". Those are public statements of intent; the contract text is what binds.

The conditions that apply to the output are about what you put in it:

• Your own artwork and photos: yours, subject to the rights you hold.
• Built-in content from Affinity or Canva: governed by the Content License Agreement, with Free Content License as the default. That agreement bars some uses that matter to designers, including building a brand mark from a library element, and our Canva commercial use guide reads it scenario by scenario. A logo made from a stock shape is the typical trap.
• Third-party fonts and brushes: the font's own licence applies. A free app does not make a downloaded font free for client work; see the commercial font licensing guide.
• Canva AI output: the AI Product Terms (effective June 26, 2026) say "you own your Output, except for any Output that modifies or incorporates Licensed Content", that you "may use your Output for any lawful purpose", and that outputs "may not be unique". They add that if you use AI to edit a photo from the Canva library "you won't own this Output". Copyright in AI-generated images is a separate legal question; the AI images guide covers it.

What still costs money

The Get Affinity FAQ and Canva's help page agree on one thing: the paid layer is Canva's AI. On a Canva premium plan (Pro, Business, Enterprise, Education) the AI tools become available inside Affinity, and without one, in the FAQ's words, "these are only available to those with Canva premium accounts." The examples named are Generative Fill, Generative Expand, Generate Image/Vector, and Remove Background. The AI terms note that Canva may set usage limits: "AI Usage Limits are operational controls and not fixed entitlements."

We found no pricing for the enterprise route on the pages we read, so no cost is stated here for it.

The risks nobody puts in the headline

The account tie

Because access runs through a Canva account and an entitlement check, you depend on Canva's sign-in service. The Get Affinity FAQ says you must be online to download and activate, and "from then on, there is no requirement to be online, even with extended offline periods." It also says some features need a connection: "product help, lessons, stock libraries and integrations with Canva including AI tools." A freelancer working offline for weeks is covered; one who can never reach Canva is not.

The file format dependency

The Get Affinity FAQ states that Affinity V1 and V2 "cannot open files that are created or saved in the newer app", whose native file is .af. The new app opens V1 and V2 files. If you keep client archives in .af, keep exports in open formats alongside them.

An exit plan, in case access changes

Clause 14 lets Canva limit or disable access without notice, and clause 24 ends your right to run the app when the licence ends. You cannot negotiate either, but you can make them cheap. The test is simple: on the day access disappears, which deliverables can you still open and edit? The formats the vendor names for export, PDF, SVG, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and WebP for graphics, open in other tools, though the vendor itself says an exported PDF or SVG opened in Illustrator does not keep full editability. So for each client project keep three things: the native .af source, an editable-as-possible SVG or PDF of every vector deliverable, and a flattened PNG or TIFF proof. The .af file is the only one that depends on Canva's software surviving. For a studio holding years of client archives, that is the number worth tracking: how many projects exist only as .af files. Old V1 and V2 licences stay valid, according to the vendor, which makes a V2 installer and key a sensible second exit, as the decision table below notes.

Compatibility, as claimed by the vendor

We did not test these. The table collects what Affinity's product pages say about file support, with page names, so you can judge what to verify with your own files before a client job.

The print line on the feature list is covered in its own section below, because Affinity documents it elsewhere in more detail. For the file formats above, open one real client file of each type and compare it with the original before you promise round trips. Check bleed and marks as in the bleed and safe area guide.

A worked example: the first paid logo job

Take a freelancer who has used Affinity for personal work and now has a paid logo job for a small client. The inputs are stated; none are real.

• Software: the free app, signed in with her own Canva account on her own laptop. Clause 6 covers a private individual on a device she personally owns.
• Deliverables: logo in SVG and PDF, a PNG set, and the .af source file.
• Fonts: one open-licence font, plus one built-in typeface supplied inside the app.

The checks run in order. The software licence has no non-commercial limit, so she can invoice. Built-in content is Affinity-Licensed Content under the Free Content License, and as our Canva guide reads it, that licence bars building a library element into a logo or brand mark and restricts what you can do with its fonts. So she replaces the library shape with her own drawing and sets the wordmark in the open-licence font, which carries its own clear terms. She exports SVG and PDF for the client, because the vendor says other apps open those but without full editability, and she keeps the .af as her source, telling the client the editable format may not open in older Affinity versions. Her contract, not the software terms, says who owns the logo. The licence question is closed in an afternoon; the contract question is the one that needed her attention.

The same freelancer's second job: a printed A5 flyer

Her next client wants 500 A5 flyers from a local printer. The licence question is already closed, so the work is about the file. She starts a new document at 148 x 210 mm, CMYK/8, 300 DPI and a 3 mm bleed, which makes the working canvas 154 x 216 mm. The client supplied a 1,600 x 1,100 pixel photograph. Divided across the 154 mm bleed width that is about 264 DPI, so she asks for the original file instead of enlarging it, and places the photo rather than pasting it so that the image resolution reads correctly. She sets the margins at 5 mm to mark the safe zone, keeps the phone number and address inside the resulting 138 x 200 mm area, and runs the Preflight panel before export. The printer's reply to her questions about the PDF standard, profile and bleed says PDF/X-1a:2003 with crop marks, so she picks that preset, ticks the bleed box, opens the PDF in a reader to confirm the marks and the bleed, and sends a single test file before the 500 copies. The freelancer's licence needed no attention on this job; the print spec did.

What the September 2026 release changed

Affinity's blog post "What's New in Affinity: Blend Tool, Scripting, and over 60 updates", published September 15, 2026, matters here for a date reason. The Affinity Terms we read are dated March 12, 2026, six months before it, and a release of this size is the moment a licence text can change. Compare the "Last Updated" date on the Affinity Terms with the build you installed. The post also reports three facts that bear on client work:

• Native INDD import. The post says you can "bring in your existing work with native INDD import", which narrows the layout gap the page-layout FAQ describes through IDML. Export is a separate matter: the same FAQ says Affinity "does not export to INDD or IDML", and nothing we read changes that.
• Custom preflight rules. The post lists "custom Preflight rules that catch your house-style errors automatically." For a studio, that turns a style guide into a check on font names, colour modes and image resolution before a file leaves the building. It does not say what a printer's own preflight applies, so keep testing against the printer's spec.
• Brand Kit sync, scripting and AI. Canva Brand Kit colours appear in the app, which ties a file's colours to an account, the same dependency the account clauses describe. Scripting runs "across vector, pixel, and layout in the same document", and scripts that call outside services bring their own terms. The post says "most of this release is free to use" and ties Canva AI Studio to a premium plan.

The release adds capability without changing what we found about commercial use: the posts describe features, not licence limits.

Which document is how old

Any row can change without the others. If a client contract depends on a clause, save a dated copy of that clause rather than a link.

Print output: what Affinity's own pages say

The Get Affinity feature list says "Print-ready output: CMYK, spot colors, preflight, and bleed support." That line names capabilities only. Two other pages from Affinity itself go further and name the standards. The blog article "Print design: everything you need to know before going to print", published March 31, 2026, walks through a print job in the current app. The older Publisher 2 help page "Publishing PDF files" lists the export presets. So the plain answer to "does it do CMYK and PDF/X?" is yes on the vendor's own documentation, with the caveat that we read those pages and did not run an export.

The Publisher 2 help page lists the professional presets by name: "PDF (press ready)", "PDF/X-1a:2003", "PDF/X-3:2003" and "PDF/X-4". It describes the PDF/X case as "for CMYK output" and says "all your publication's colors will be output in the CMYK color space". It also says the "Include bleed" option puts any bleed set in Document Setup into the PDF, and its table shows that box ticked only for the press-ready preset. A designer who builds a bleed into the document but exports with a digital preset gets a PDF with no bleed in it. That page documents the Publisher 2 app, and the new Affinity may differ in menu names, so treat it as the best written description of the presets rather than a screenshot of your version.

What the guide leaves out matters as much as what it includes. It never names a specific ICC profile, so it cannot tell you whether your printer's press expects a European coated profile or a North American one. It says nothing about rich black, overprint or paper stock, which are the settings where a CMYK file most often goes wrong on press. On spot colour it says only that spot colours suit exact brand matches and that not every printer supports Pantone. Those are exactly the items to settle with the printer before the first job, not assumptions to take from a software vendor's overview.

Choosing between the two presets Affinity recommends

The guide's own rule is the one to follow: "Your printer will tell you which one they want. If they haven't asked, ask them." What we cannot tell from the pages is how the app converts a placed RGB photograph when the preset demands CMYK, which is why a test export belongs before a paid job. Our PDF/X-1a versus PDF/X-4 guide explains the standards themselves, and the CMYK versus RGB guide covers what happens to colour on conversion.

Bleed and pixel sizes, worked out

Affinity's guide gives two numbers: a 3 mm bleed on every edge and a safe zone at least 5 mm inside the trim line. At 300 DPI the pixel size of a side is its length in millimetres divided by 25.4, times 300. The table applies both rules to four common trim sizes. The arithmetic is ours; the 3 mm, 5 mm and 300 DPI figures are Affinity's.

Two uses of the table. A background photo for an A5 flyer needs at least 1,819 x 2,551 pixels to reach 300 DPI across the bleed; a 1,200 x 800 web image prints only 101.6 x 67.7 mm at 300 DPI, so stretched across the 154 mm bleed width it falls to about 198 DPI. And the live-area column shows how little room a business card leaves: 75 x 45 mm for everything that must not be trimmed. Some printers specify a different bleed, so use the table's method with their number, not ours.

Five lines to send a printer before the first job

Whatever the software, the printer's answers decide the settings. A message that gets usable answers fits in five lines:

1. Which PDF standard do you accept: PDF/X-1a:2003, PDF/X-4, or either?
2. Which ICC profile should the CMYK files use?
3. What bleed do you need, and do you want crop marks in the file?
4. Do you print Pantone spot colours, or convert them to CMYK?
5. Can you preflight one test PDF before I send the real artwork?

The last question is the cheap insurance. One checked file confirms the preset, the profile and the bleed together, and it turns the vendor's capability list into a tested workflow.

What to do in your situation

Three habits cover most of the risk on this page: save the date-stamped terms, keep one open-format copy of every deliverable beside the .af source, and test one print file before the first print job. If the next question is what the built-in assets can carry into a client's brand, the licensing checklist and the Canva commercial use guide are the pages to open.

Designers' questions about Affinity

Is Affinity really free forever?

Canva's launch post says "completely free, forever", and the product FAQ says the app will receive free updates. The licence text keeps Canva's right to "suspend, remove, modify or disable" access at any time without notice, so treat "forever" as a stated intention.

Can I use Affinity for client work and invoice for it?

The Affinity Terms we read contain no non-commercial limitation on the software, and say your own content is under your control. Check the current text on the day you start, and ask Canva in writing if you are a team.

Do I need Canva Pro?

No. The Get Affinity FAQ says you can access all vector, layout and pixel tools "for free with just a free Canva account", and a premium plan is only needed for Canva AI tools.

Does the free version put a watermark on exports?

We found no mention of a watermark in the terms or product pages we read, and the FAQ says export features come "with no restrictions or payment needed". That is the vendor's statement, not our test.

Can I open Photoshop and Illustrator files?

The vendor lists PSD and AI among import formats and says layers and structure are preserved. Complex files can differ, so try a real file before depending on it.

Does Affinity train AI on my files?

Canva says in the launch post that Canva AI features are built so your work "is not used to train AI features". That is a company statement, repeated in Creative Bloq's coverage. Check the AI Product Terms for the contract wording.

Does Affinity export print-ready PDFs with CMYK and PDF/X?

Affinity's own print guide (March 31, 2026) describes CMYK/8 documents, ICC profile conversion, PDF/X-1a:2003 and PDF/X-4 export, and a Preflight panel, and the Publisher 2 help page lists PDF/X-3:2003 as well. We read those pages and did not run an export, so send your printer one test file first.

Licence texts and product pages read

Dated October 23, 2026, the day we read each document.

• Affinity Terms (Canva), canva.com/policies/affinity-additional-terms, "Last Updated: 12 March 2026".
• Canva Terms of Use, canva.com/policies/terms-of-use, effective August 19, 2026.
• Canva AI Product Terms, canva.com/policies/ai-product-terms, effective June 26, 2026.
• Affinity, Get Affinity, home page, Affinity vs Adobe, graphic design and page layout pages.
• Affinity, Print design: everything you need to know before going to print, published March 31, 2026, and Affinity Publisher 2 Help, Publishing PDF files.
• Affinity, What's New in Affinity: Blend Tool, Scripting, and over 60 updates, published September 15, 2026, and the Get Affinity feature list.
• Canva, Introducing the all-new Affinity and Accessing Affinity for free with a Canva account.
• Creative Bloq, Affinity reveals how it can go 100% free forever, page dated November 6, 2025.
• Not checked: how the export presets behave on real files, whether the Publisher 2 preset names match your installed build, any enterprise pricing, and any term outside the documents above. The pixel and bleed table is our arithmetic. We did not install or test Affinity.
• A reading of public documents rather than legal advice. Terms change, so check the current text before you rely on it.