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
Frequently asked questions
Is Affinity Publisher really free now?
Yes, for individuals. affinity.studio says so plainly — “Affinity is free for individuals (seriously)” — under a heading reading “Zero bucks given”. It is worth knowing that Affinity Publisher no longer exists as a separate product: Canva, which acquired Serif, merged Designer, Photo and Publisher into one app with Vector, Pixel and Layout modes working in a single .af file. Book layout is what used to be Publisher, and it is now the Layout mode.
How much is InDesign in the UK?
£21.98 a month including VAT on Adobe’s UK site, on the annual plan billed monthly. That is £263.76 a year, every year, for as long as you use it. Stop paying and the software stops opening, which is the part of a subscription that catches people out on a project they return to two years later.
Can Affinity do everything InDesign does for a book?
For laying out a book, close enough that most authors will never find the edge: bleed, CMYK, master pages, facing pages, paragraph and character styles, tables of contents, and print-ready PDF/X export all work. It also imports IDML, so an InDesign file can come across. What it does not match is data merge, GREP styles, some of the finer typographic controls, and the ecosystem — plugins, scripts and the fact that every professional you send a file to expects .indd.
Which should I use for a picture book or a cookbook?
Either will do the layout; neither will do it easily. Full-bleed spreads, two-column recipe layouts and fixed-layout EPUB for Kindle Kids are genuinely difficult jobs with a real learning curve in both. If this is your first illustrated book, the software cost is not the expensive part — the fortnight you spend learning it is.
What happens to my files if I stop paying for InDesign?
You keep the .indd files and lose the ability to open them. That is the structural argument for Affinity: a free app you own outright cannot lock your back catalogue behind a lapsed card. If you publish a series and come back to book one in three years, it matters.
Does Affinity being owned by Canva change anything?
Commercially, it is why it is free — Canva acquired Serif and folded Affinity into its wider offering, with Canva AI now built into the app. Practically, the files are still local, the app still runs on your machine, and it still exports PDF/X. The honest risk with any free product is that the terms can change later, which is an argument for keeping your source files in a format you can move.
