The Problem with the Curve and Linearity Pro Subscription Model

Curve (now renamed Linearity), a vector drawing app supporting Apple macOS and iPadOS, forced users’ design work to be uploaded to their cloud servers at the end of last year, and even prohibited users from accessing and using their own creations offline, drawing angry criticism from many foreign users.

On the large foreign discussion platform Reddit, a user mallbedde exposed that in the past, hundreds of programmers, in support of the spirit of sharing, had once helped this company develop and maintain many program issues during its days under the old name Vectornato.

This is also why it currently has the most complete Chinese localization of any drawing software on the market.

Curve Starts Planning to Charge

Then one day, the company suddenly renamed itself Curve, trying to cover up its various dark histories, and abandoned the people who had once helped them develop the system.

Just hearing this makes one feel that this company is entirely operating on a bait-and-switch, lock-in, and kill model—hardly the way a legitimate operation should be managed.

Since the middle of last year, I knew they were planning to build a paid service. At the time I thought it was only for another new video animation program they had launched, Move. Since it wasn’t a feature I would use, I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

It was only after the official launch of the paid service that I realized they had actually counted the Curve vector drawing software in as well, bundling the two programs together for sale.

This is also a very absurd point: a brand-new program you’ve just launched, with no user base yet—what makes you think users would be willing to pay for it to replace the animation editing program they were already using?

What’s more, for users like us who simply want a simple vector drawing and layout tool, we have no use for the other animation program at all, yet we’re required to buy it forcibly—this really makes one want to go flip a table at their headquarters.

Betraying User Trust by Forcing Charges

Their team even limited the free version of Curve to saving only 3 works, and as long as the device is offline, you can’t even work with local files.

For example, when offline and trying to open or delete a local file, the system pops up an error warning telling you to give up. The only way it works normally is to upload the local file to the cloud server first and then operate.

Of course, if a file was previously uploaded to the cloud, you can still edit it normally while offline, but you cannot delete or add. This makes the whole operating system very unintuitive, and even makes one suspect the possibility of sync errors.

Perhaps the best approach for users finally forced to compromise is to delete their local works and rely entirely on the official cloud space to store their work—but this approach actually goes against my personal philosophy of computer security.

This outrageous maneuver has led foreign netizens to point directly at it as a racketeering system, causing quite a stir.

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Update 113.11.11: Perhaps because the reputation was too bad, Curve further restricted various features of the free version, including image export. This has now touched more people’s bottom line.

A Discussion of Curve’s Subscription Pricing

Finally, let’s look at the price and features. Linearity Pro’s monthly subscription fee is NT$390 (NT$2,990 annually), which isn’t too expensive, but it’s also hard to make ordinary users willing to pay.

Although the world’s most popular Adobe Illustrator has a higher monthly fee of NT$746 (NT$966 for the full Creative Cloud suite).

However, for professional designers who need it for work, they will absolutely choose the more professional Adobe Illustrator. The price difference is only NT$356, but stability, support, and application features are worlds apart. You can even pay NT$220 more to use the full suite of professional audio-visual editing design software. Not to mention that they release various cheap discounts to users during holidays.

So in my view, Linearity this time is completely targeting low-usage users, and carries a certain sense of hijacking and hostage-taking**.

Actually, if they had chosen to sell a perpetual license for the program from the start, we could have considered it; but this company’s strategy is precisely selling a “subscription right” to “low-demand” users.

If usage isn’t high, how do you think users would prioritize paying? And for the group eager to pay, they would have long since gone to subscribe to AI, without needing to relearn how to operate.

Here I suggest that if you haven’t updated the software yet, immediately turn off the auto-update feature and just keep using the old version, since the current version has more or less reached a relatively perfect state.

What If You Don’t Want to Pay for a Subscription?

If you’ve already updated and are facing the problem of being forced to pay, and like me you don’t intend to be extorted, then you have the following two solutions:

1. Organize all your design files, delete the ones you don’t need, and for the ones you do need, save them in SVG format in your local file library, and clear all cloud files down to three or fewer to comply with the company’s policy;

In the future, when you need to edit an old file, just reload the SVG file.

2. Adopt other software, including the vector drawing software Adobe Illustrator mentioned earlier, and another veteran professional vector drawing program CorelDraw (which I personally think is easier to use than AI, but its monthly fee is even higher at NT$955);

In addition, there is Affinity Designer 2 on Apple iPad that you can try, which only costs NT$390 for a perpetual license. The only hassle is that this software’s UI design is overly fragmented, making it somewhat difficult to get the hang of, and it still lacks an auto-trace feature for converting raster images to vector images, even though they’ve been promising it for seven or eight years (sigh).

Well, there is an online website that offers image-to-vector conversion, and I recommend you go try it yourself at Vectorizer.io.