Published —
The rise and fall of a software giant
For thirteen years, an Adobe subscription was the price of working in the creative industry. Now a single developer is cloning its tools in weeks.
May 2012: Adobe introduces Creative Cloud subscriptions, revolutionising the SaaS model for professional software across the whole creative industry.
May 2013: Adobe makes subscriptions mandatory, locking hundreds of thousands of professionals into an infinite subscription model. Shareholders celebrate. Creatives have no choice but to accept their fate. Perpetual one-time licences are gone.
2013–2026: Adobe continues to be the de facto standard for anyone working in the creative industry. Many alternatives are developed, some with moderate success. Open-source projects trying to copy certain features take off, but all of them are missing specific features or have even worse UX than the original Adobe tools.
September 2026: A single developer named Brandon Thomas decides he has had enough. Within a few weeks he "clones" the most prominent Adobe tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Premiere, Lightroom, etc.
Brandon promises feature parity within one month. His tools are written in Rust, making them extremely fast and performant. They run on Windows, macOS and Linux. While Adobe Photoshop is several gigabytes in size, his clone is only around 100 MB. Adobe still has no native Linux applications.
He is criticised for producing AI slop. People attack him on social media. His response is pretty clear:
"My guy, I can code. In college I was building laser games on skyscrapers and cloning the luciferase-luciferin system into plants via agrobacterium-mediated transfection. AI models enable me to work as an entire company. I'm doing 4x better than Google's revenue per employee."
People are still busy discrediting his work. I have already cancelled my Adobe subscriptions for the whole company (still locked in until February 2027). What's funny: when I contacted Adobe support, because there is no way to cancel business subscriptions outside a small window of 30 days per year, they instantly offered me a 40% discount without me asking for it.
Adobe is cooked, and this is just the beginning. All the ArtCraft apps are open source: even if they shut Brandon down, there is no way back. He has also decided to clone AutoCAD, because why not?
Don't believe it? Just try it for yourself.
Keep in mind that it has only been two weeks since the first release.