The short answer
Affinity, unless somebody else needs your file.
Affinity is free for individuals. InDesign is £21.98 a month including VAT — £263.76 a year, indefinitely. For laying out your own book, the free one now does the job.
| Affinity | Adobe InDesign | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free for individuals | £21.98/month incl. VAT |
| Over 3 years | £0 | £791.28 |
| Ownership | Yours, runs offline | Stops opening when you stop paying |
| Bleed, CMYK, PDF/X | Yes | Yes |
| Master and facing pages | Yes | Yes |
| IDML import | Yes | — |
| Data merge, GREP styles | No | Yes |
| What printers and designers expect | .af | .indd |
From affinity.studio and adobe.com/uk, read 23 September 2026.
What actually changed
Two things, and most guides have only noticed one.
It is free. Canva acquired Serif and Affinity is now free for individuals. Their own page says “Affinity is free for individuals (seriously)”, under a heading reading “Zero bucks given”.
It is one app. Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher are no longer three products. There is a single app called Affinity with Vector, Pixel and Layout modes working in one .af file. If you are looking for “Affinity Publisher”, it is the Layout mode, and it costs nothing.
So any guide telling you to budget around £55 for Affinity Publisher — including, until today, several pages on this site — is describing a product and a price that both stopped existing.
What £263.76 a year still buys
InDesign is not overpriced software that lost. It is the professional standard and there are real reasons to pay:
- Everyone else uses it. Send a book to a designer, a typesetter, a printer’s pre-press desk or a publisher and they will expect
.indd. Affinity exports PDF and imports IDML, but it does not make you fluent in the language the industry speaks. - Data merge, for anything generated from a spreadsheet — catalogues, directories, certificates.
- GREP styles, which apply formatting by pattern. If you have ever needed every ISBN in a 400-page book to be non-breaking, you know why this matters.
- Scripts and plugins, a two-decade ecosystem Affinity has no equivalent of.
- Finer typographic control — optical margin alignment, more granular justification, better handling of complex scripts.
None of those appear in a straightforward novel. All of them appear in professional production work.
The arithmetic
| Affinity | InDesign | |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | £0 | £263.76 |
| Year 3 | £0 | £791.28 |
| Year 5 | £0 | £1,318.80 |
| If you stop paying | Still works | Files will not open |
At a £9.99 paperback earning roughly £2.14 after print, one year of InDesign is 124 copies. Five years is 617.
That is not an argument against InDesign for someone who lays out books for a living. It is a serious argument against it for someone laying out three of their own.
The part that is true of both
Neither is easy, and the software is not the expensive part of an illustrated book — the learning is.
A picture book needs full-bleed spreads that survive trimming, fixed-layout EPUB so the image-text composition holds on a phone, and two-page-spread metadata so a spread is not served as two cropped halves. A cookbook needs two-column ingredient layouts, recipe-card pagination and photography pre-flighted at 300 DPI.
Both apps can do all of it. Both will take you a fortnight to learn well enough to do it right, and the first attempt will be wrong in ways you cannot see until it is printed.
Or skip the fortnight
Picture books £219, cookbooks £179, standard interiors from £69 — built to KDP's spec, print-ready, 24-hour turnaround on text books.
Format my book →Choose Affinity if
- You lay out your own books and nobody else opens the file
- You want to own the software rather than rent it
- You are coming back to a back catalogue in a few years
- You are on a budget, which — at £0 against £263.76 a year — is most people
Choose InDesign if
- You work with designers, printers or publishers who expect
.indd - You need data merge or GREP styles
- You do this professionally and the subscription is a business cost
- You already know it, and your time is worth more than £22 a month
Related
- Canva for book covers — the other free option, and its ceiling
- Best book formatting software — all nine, priced
- Picture book KDP formatting — why illustrated books are the hard case
- Cookbook KDP formatting — two-column layouts and photo pre-flight
- KDP cover template — building the wrap to spec
