December 3, 2025
Free Lunch Forever Comes With Corkage
Big tech promises a banquet, then quietly charges corkage, then gouges again for the tablecloth, the chair, the cutlery, and finally to use the bathroom.
Take Affinity’s new positioning, which at first glance sounds super generous.
Free for everyone forever. Catchy.
Also familiar. Big tech promises a banquet, then quietly charges corkage, then gouges a fee for the tablecloth, the chair, the cutlery, and eventually to use the bathroom. In Affinity’s case, to access the full AI toolset you need a premium Canva licence.
Wait, what?
Oh thats right, they’re sister companies.
Their promo video talks about earning trust. Hmmmm, sure.
To be clear, there’s no beef with Canva or Affinity. They’re simply a textbook example of an overused tactic. As an agency owner, these clickbait free deals feel downright dirty. In FMCG it’s a loss leader. Sell a gallon of milk below cost, then make super profits on everything else in the cart.
Creative teams have seen this movie before. The entry point is free, until the tools you actually need to work at a professional level shift behind paywalls, bundles, credits, or new tiers. It’s a model built to lock you in, then gently nudge you upward until you’re paying far more than planned.
It’s like being handed a free Ferrari and then being charged a million for the keys.
And the wild part? Affinity has managed to make arch rival Adobe look transparent and predictable, even fair by comparison. That’s some feat right there.
Blutui Maps a Different Flight Path
Agencies don’t thrive with surprises scattered across their cost base. They need clarity, predictability, and the confidence that their platform partner won’t weaponise future features later.
That’s why Blutui takes the opposite approach.
Clear commercial terms
Transparent pricing
Negotiated enterprise licensing that respects the realities of agency operations
A bottomless feature cup, not a series of future toll roads
When we say unlimited, we mean it. When we say your pricing won’t inflate every time we ship something clever, we stand by it. Our value doesn’t come from dangling features or squeezing teams into artificial upgrade paths. It comes from delivering a platform that gets agencies to market faster, with fewer resources, and without financial sleight of hand.
Agencies Despise Surprises
The people making hard calls inside agencies don’t need another ecosystem with hidden traps. They need a platform built by people who understand agency economics.
Blutui gives you freedom and capability without the future ransom. We earn trust the old fashioned way. By being honest about what we charge, what we build, and what you can expect from us tomorrow.
If the industry is heading toward more opacity, more layers, and more trickery, we’re heading in the opposite direction. They zig, we zag.
And here at Blutui, we’re proud of that.
More from Articles
Get Blutui platform news + updates straight to your inbox
We partner with some extraordinary organisations
