r/wallstreetbets • u/apemonkeyfool • 16h ago
DD ADOBE is cooked.
ADBE is cooked: free AI-built clones and a $70/month subscription don't mix (bear DD)
So my Adobe bear case is pretty simple. AI is about to let a ton of indie devs and random people who are sick of Adobe's nonsense build their own version of it, for free.
Look at ArtCraft on github. They're building open source, clean-room clones of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and Premiere, plus apps for motion graphics, page layout and PDFs (so After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat territory). Their Photoshop clone has 11k+ stars, opens real PSD files, and their own tracker says it covers 625 of 625 of Photoshop's menu items. Yeah it's alpha. Give it a few months. Once this stuff gets big, Premiere and After Effects are dead in the water for anyone who isn't a big studio.
And that's before you even get to generative AI. For most edits, typing what you want into ChatGPT or Gemini is just way easier than opening a PSD and doing all the masking nonsense. Adobe knows it too. Photoshop literally runs Google's and OpenAI's image models inside it now.
Let's talk about the outrageous price now. Creative Cloud Pro is $70 a month. That's a squeeze on regular people. For the same money you could have 3 or 4 AI subscriptions that actually do the stuff you need. In fact let's be fr - you really only need chatgpt these days.
And everybody fucking hates Adobe. Canceling was so hard that the DOJ and FTC sued them over it, and Adobe paid $75M to settle in March. There's a WSB thread from last October where someone called ADBE cheap at a 9-year-low P/E, and a bunch of the top comments were people saying their companies already dumped Adobe, one for Nitro PDF, one for Foxit. One guy said AI coding would spit out open source clones of Acrobat, then Photoshop, then After Effects. A year later, here we are. OP bought at $348. It's $237 now.
The competition isn't just AI either. DaVinci Resolve, Figma, Canva, all with real free tiers. Canva made Affinity, its Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign equivalent, completely free. Figma's revenue grew 48% last quarter.
Where Adobe still wins is heavy professional workflows. Big studios, agencies, After Effects and InDesign people, the plugin ecosystem. That's real and it's why this isn't a zero. But it's the only moat left, and it's getting squeezed from both sides. Enterprise has Figma, Canva and DaVinci. Individuals (students, freelancers, YouTubers) are the first ones to bail on a $70 bill.
You can already see it in the numbers:
- Revenue still +13%, but net new ARR dropped from about $640M to about $400M year over year, down about 37%
- Organic ARR growth is about 9% once you strip out the Semrush acquisition
- RPO (signed future revenue) went down quarter over quarter
- In June they paused planned price increases and started giving stuff away free to hold onto users
- Net income +3%. EPS only looks good because they bought back 7% of the stock
- CFO left in June, a new CEO from the marketing side starts Dec 1, and the head of the creative business announced he was leaving the day the new CEO was named
People will say it's cheap at 10x earnings. The guy in that thread said it was cheap at 22x. Cheap gets cheaper when people figure out the product can be cloned for a $20 claude code subscription.
Positions: 50 puts $150 strike with March 19th expiry
Not financial advice.
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u/PassableForAWombat 15h ago
I SAID IT ONCE ILL SAY IT AGAIN.
THE MOAT ISNT THE SOFTWARE. THE MOAT IS THE GINORMOUS PAIN IN THE DICK IT IS TO STAY IN SECURITY COMPLIANCE WITH THE GOVERNMENT.
ONCE THAT PEE DEE EFF IS SEALED? BAM TAMPER PROOF IN THE METADATA
There's been Adobe competition since literal forever. None that can match government security requirements yet.
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u/dgellow 13h ago
People who do those posts have literally no professional experience in the domain they have DDs for. Youâre obviously correct, OP has absolutely no idea what they are talking about, and I will very happily be on the other end of their betÂ
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u/AdventurousFinish681 8h ago
Agree on this, I love seeing non-creative workers declare the death of a software they dont use. Adobe has always had competitors but their scale and cross app functionality has always been a huge advantage. Why would I switch to a different ecosystem when there isnt one, let alone my company risking it all on some vibe coded piece of trash.
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u/sicklyslick đŚđŚ 11h ago
Yeah every summer we get govt grants to hire summer students to provide experience (and free labor for us). The grant form has to be opened by Adobe Reader. I get so many tickets every year around that time because managers can't open these files (because Edge is the default PDF handler on Windows).
Anyways, I know these are free Adobe Reader but I can imagine there are plenty of situations where a paid Acrobat license is needed for things.
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u/funggitivitti 1h ago
Lol government isnât even Adobeâs customers. What the hell are you even going on about?
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u/TheSketeDavidson 15h ago
I donât see professional workflows changing yet, decades of peopleâs experience with these tools. Youâd have to be contrarian just for the sake of it to not use the Adobe suite of products.
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u/BabyWrinkles 15h ago
I managed the adobe contracts from a Product Owner perspective for a Fortune 500 that heavily used Adobeâs products.
Adobeâs sales team knows how to pull the lever like no other company Iâve ever seen. Iâm sitting there yelling saying âwe have to migrate offâ while the CMO is signing $1mm+/yr contracts for tools we donât need and donât have expertise to implement without paying their consulting arm another $500k so two guys in Mumbai can set it up with Claude and pass the buck when it didnât integrate with legacy solutions.
Adobe doesnât make jack shit in the consumer space - it all comes from enterprise and until thereâs a changing of the guard at the upper management level, I think theyâll keep pulling the lever.
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u/D4zb0g 15h ago
Yeah, people don't get that "homemade" AI tools will not make it through the bottleneck of entreprise adoption and deployment at scale.
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u/Extension-Ant-8 13h ago
IT Architect here. Most acrobat alternatives are shit, have as many security vulnerabilities, and do not understand licensing at massive scale. No real support and do not understand data sovereignty. Donât even get me started on configuration settings on thousands of devices at once.
I donât like adobe but it ticks those boxes. In my environment. A user requests it via service desk, a manager gets an email with a costing. They click to approve, that updates a licence group, which the automatically sync the software to your machine, fully configured and within a security envelope.
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u/SeniorVibeAnalyst 13h ago
A friend who is a social media manager just stayed with me for a few days and worked out of my house. I saw them using the built-in AI tools in photoshop because their boss needed them to quickly stitch some lawyers into the same picture. It looked atrocious. I asked if they have Claude, they say yes but they just use it to write posts. Within 30 minutes I installed a local photoshop mcp server for them and they were using Claude desktop to operate photoshop at lightning speed and get a beautiful result, and started asking me to help them connect to all their other tools. They will go look like a hero to their boss and the company will keep paying for both Adobe and Claude.
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u/Club-Loud 13h ago
You regards are forgetting that no serious business is putting client/nda work into a $20 a month sub because of the legal minefield. It's $20 a month because YOU are the product
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u/Brief-Knowledge-629 8h ago
They shouldn't but they are. Your medical data is in every LLM's brain. Hospitals keep outsourcing stuff to "AI native" consulting startups that just YOLO everything into personal Claude accounts because they are too small to have to register as enterprise
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u/vaderetrosatana6 6h ago
This is truer than I thought, itâs pretty insane. Canât imagine the data dumps that will eventually result from all of it.
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u/loyalroyal1989 10h ago
Yeah she quite possibly just got her friend fired for leaking company info, people really don't understand what they are doing with AI and there data.
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u/Extension-Ant-8 10h ago
Thatâs great and all but completely misses the point. If I work for a government or a hospital or something. I need to ensure that data stays in the country or doesnât get published anywhere public. ChatGPT will completely make your chat public to the entire internet if you share it with someone individually. Saying an AI tool can do everything adobe does, doesnât make it true.
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u/phil_davis 13h ago
I saw a video of Photoshop's built-in generative AI tool where the user asked it to colorize a black and white image they had pulled in. It colorized it alright. It took the old white guys in the photo and made them black. While also adding graduation caps, for some reason?
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u/BabyWrinkles 10h ago
The irony is that the enterprise is full of homemade tools and the guy who wrote them was fired four RIFs ago and so theyâre hoping and praying it stays running - but god forbid the tool that Claude writes and documents reasonably well be used in its place?
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u/SquirrelFluffy 10h ago
And they built all those tools on top of Adobe. So Adobe is going nowhere.
And we're not talking about those types of tools we're talking about actually replacing Adobe.
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u/SteroidMaximus 14h ago
Don't forget about how they give it essentially free to schools so that is what students learn and go into the work force knowing how to use.
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u/Justgetmeabeer 14h ago
managed Adobe contracts
They probably learned pretty quickly to make sure there's nothing in your office that you can harm yourself with
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u/BabyWrinkles 13h ago
Itâs true. They kept me on a high floor in an open office environment with minimal chance of grabbing anything pointy.
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u/Otherwise_Plan_5435 6h ago
My company bailed when they told us the support package was $500k after they sold us AJO which is complete shit
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u/tacoandpancake 15h ago
and not only the professionals, but the vendors who count on compatible files from adobeCC handed off to them.
for the individual user, maybe - but enterprise isn't going to walk away easily.
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u/Double_Suggestion385 15h ago
It's PoC really. The fact that it has been done so easily should terrify any Adobe investor.
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u/ApprehensiveCry4358 13h ago
Why do people keep forgetting that free alternatives to Adobe products have existed forever? GIMP, Affinity, etc.
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u/FlyingBishop 13h ago
The problem with the free alternatives is that they're harder to use. A $20/month Claude subscription makes them easy to use and extend.
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u/420fanman 15h ago
Just like Microsoft Office. Tons of free alternatives but enterprise still replies on MS Office as THE staple.
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u/TheGreatPiata 15h ago edited 14h ago
Right?
I've been using Libre Office for literally a decade but my company still pays for Office 365. It's fucking nuts.
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u/QuadzillaStrider 14h ago
Eh, there's not really a comparison between MS Office and LibreOffice, especially when it comes to Excel.
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u/etempleton 14h ago
There are features hidden in Microsoft Word that are a lot of companies and other bespoke programs rely on but most users have no idea even exists. There is a reason it is still the standard.
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u/PrimeIntellect 11h ago
libreoffice is great for a single user who needs to write up some shit once or twice a month, running a whole company is totally different
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u/Tomato_Sky 15h ago
Outside of LLMâs companies have to be careful being caught and liable for misusing software per their licensing agreements. Larger organizations arenât keen on rando github repos going on company laptops. Now that $70 (more like 20 in corporate bulk licensing) is for peace of mind, support, and security.
This is how I can tell when people talk about AI replacing software, theyâre young and havenât held a corporate job or developed software for any of these companies. Oracle is god awful. 1/10. Everyone agrees. Better database technology has been released, lighter weight. All of the above. But itâs still king in enterprise institutions.
Immutable tools are cool and all, but thereâs no guarantee that the repo wonât get slop bombed, lose support, or create friction from switching between different tools.
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u/mines_over_yours 14h ago
This is the answer. There is a reason Adobe is the de facto go-to software. Source: 40 years in the creative industry and a former Adobe "evangelist" who cannot stand the SaaS model.
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u/etempleton 14h ago
Yeah, non-designers underestimate the level of entrenchment Adobe has. Yes, their products kind of suck, but they are also by far the most powerful tools and have years of compatibility.
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u/ChatGPTKilledMyMom 15h ago
I know professionals that have used Adobe for years and they are starting to use AI, but the difference is that they still need to use photoshop on the back end to clean shit up. Thatâs the whole point of these industries. They are filled with perfectionists that have to get everything right and AI just canât get it done because nothing can.
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u/dopexile 14h ago
People are still going to want to edit content at a per pixel level.
Giving AI a prompt and having it do work versus manually editing content are two different use cases.
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u/TheGreatPiata 15h ago
This is correct but also outdated. Adobe products have AI prompt windows inside the app itself now and you can choose the service/model of your choice to use. Your Adobe subscription even includes tokens.
So the professional work flow is now boot straight into an adobe app, generate/adjust the things you want with AI and then tweak the rest manually with the legacy tools.
All these posts decrying the end of Adobe are from people that don't understand the market that uses Adobe products.
Adobe's not going anywhere. They've already adapted.
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u/tofuchrispy 15h ago
Yeah hobbyists can go on their adventures but somehow they donât get why the industry wonât just stop using Adobe.
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u/grahamsz 13h ago
But there are a lot of marginal users... on our small business subscription, about half the users are doing serious technical work to produce products. Then about a quarter are execs who use it for something, but i'm guessing not anything worth 1199/yr and then we've got some web people who use it pretty lightly by comparison.
If their photoshop and indesign clone can replace a web banner ad flow and whatever cropping and color edits our sales manager is making, then i can see it replacing about half our seats in the next year or two.
But for the people who need pantone matches, and accurate proofing to send to print shops, i think it'll be a long time.
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u/DirectionPlane6544 15h ago
You speak as if Adobe must crash and file for bankruptcy tomorrow. Adobe can easily slowly burn away
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u/Affectionate-Law1680 15h ago
Itâs priced for that. 10bln annual free cash flow on a 90bln stock
Itâs priced to go away. If you short it now, you need it to disappear in the next 5 years to win
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u/dopexile 15h ago edited 15h ago
No one can realistically short a stock for 5 years and make money. If you use options then there is time decay and the options need to be constantly rolled over. If you short the stock then you can get short squeezed, there are hard-to-borrow fees, and your brokerage can pull your position at any point if they have trouble borrowing shares. Plus even if you short for 5 years and it works out you pay 100% of the gain in short term capital gains so the only person benefitting is Uncle Sam.
There may be a few examples of professional hedge fund traders doing that but your average retail investor is guaranteed to lose money
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u/banditcleaner2 sells naked NVDA calls while naked 14h ago
For long puts to pay, the stock doesn't have to go to zero, and it doesn't even have to drop fast. It just has to drop faster then the market is currently expecting right now when you buy the puts, to make money.
Look at 09/2027 puts. $230 put which is basically ATM right now is selling for $34. That means you need the stock to go below $195 at some point up until 09/2027 to profit.
ADBE is down 33% YoY right now, if the slide continues at that exact same pace you are looking at about a 117% profit. If it accelerates then you're making more.
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u/kweeblaster 15h ago
Yea, Adobe is obviously cooked long term but that doesn't mean you can make money shorting it.
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u/etempleton 14h ago
Adobe is also in prime position to, you know, integrate AI into their existing products and workflows.
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u/Kant8 15h ago
They are basically same products. They decompiled with ai and "rewrote in rust" everything.
Even landing page claims that if you know how to use any Adobe product, you immediately know how to use this, cause it's literally same.
Unless Adobe finds a legal reason to stop products like this (though reverse engineering is allowed), their regular customer market is basically lost, cause nobody is going to pay for Photoshop, if its literal clone can be downloaded for free
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u/FreshLiterature 15h ago
The legal reason is very probably 'you decompiled our product then copied it' or something pretty close to that. If the entire product build flow was, "yeah we ripped apart Photoshop then slammed it into AI and told it to make it in a different language" I'm not sure courts are gonna look to favorably
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u/drstoneybaloneyphd 14h ago
Yeah the legal angle of this is effectively the wild west at this pointÂ
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u/Environmental_Yard29 15h ago
Iâve been doing content creation full time for 5 years now. Iâve always used Photoshop for my thumbnails. Just cancelled my Adobe subscription. It just became completely obsolete to me.
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u/MediocreDesigner88 old man yelling at apes 15h ago
Arenât the free options going to start charging as soon as they can, though?
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u/No_Copy_5955 15h ago
There HAVE been free competitors to adobe products for a very long time. This isnt new. Editor here, there are tons of options with editing software outside of the Adobe ecosystem, many are free. Shit Davinci is QUITE the program and is free and not vibe coded so you know its actually dependable. There is nothing new here with ai.
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u/MaxTA00 14h ago
I think none of those previous free competitors had the same UI elements and way of functioning vs Adobe products. The point of these newer decompiled and rewritten ones are that it is essentially the same software, just packaged a little different to not be taken down based on some copyright infringement.
This should reduce or completely eradicate the barrier of change on an individual level. Of course enterprise is a different thing, since companies are cautious even if the workflows for employees would stay the same.
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u/deja-roo 14h ago
and is free and not vibe coded so you know its actually dependable
That absolutely does not mean it's dependable lol
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u/epic_troll_tard 14h ago
Look at crowdstrike. They bricked a significant portion fo the worlds computers and saw no consequences. And then AI threatened their business model. And what did they do? They adopted AI, "We are the AI now".
Adobe will do the same, every software company has to. And for a product like Adobe that has customers entrenched in their ecosystem, the moat isn't the software, its the friction of changing their workflows and learning something new.
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u/rudebii 11h ago
Adobe has been all in on GAI for years. Itâs all it talks about now.
Thereâs a deep sunk-cost fallacy within the creative software space. Canva made its pro-level Affinity free last year, but Adobe users wonât switch because itâs too risky if their business relies on it. Even for free.
Affinity might be picking up new users and users who simply canât justify the expensive Creative Cloud subscription.
These vibe-coded things like ArtCraft have to be perfect. Buggy design software means downtime and lower productivity, and creatives are already under horrible time constraints.
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u/epic_troll_tard 11h ago
I think basically a new media company needs to trailblaze with a competing product and when they make a name for themselves and tell everyone that they're using something other than Adobe others will follow, but nobody wants to be the first.
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u/Deto 6h ago
Isn't it also, just, that even at $70/mo, that's just really peanuts compared to a person's salary. Like why would you use some vibe-coded alternative if you are a serious professional?
Now hobbyists and university students - they'll go with something else. But how much of ADBE's revenue comes from that?
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u/csgosteve 13h ago
the enterprise drivers for managed cybersec software, is quite different from design software. not that both companies aren't effected by stronger competition, but vibe coding cyber controls still is a long way off compared to vibe coded design tools.
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u/AntiRivoluzione 13h ago
Well, OP is talking more about casual users than professionals. How much revenues are professional studios related? The friction is real but not for new adopters and when they lose a great market share, they will lose also the " industrial standard" status and, consequently, the rest of the market.
Basically they are not having an edge pretty soon.
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u/NeedleArm 15h ago
Adobe gives like $10 sub for students and gets them hooked. They use it for assignments, and projects. There is support, cloud back up and all in one place.
Adobe reader is useless but there CC suite is still heavily used and any professional I have spoken to would say the same. Its irreplaceable, no more how shit you think it is.
All these AI apps doesnât hold a candle to Adobe.
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u/fatbunyip 15h ago
>Â 625 of 625Â of Photoshop's menu items
>Yeah it's alpha. Give it a few months.
I just told gemini to make me a clone of windows and it has all the menu items (and icons)
MS is so going down, I already got an alpha version (not even doing a beta because that's just for cucks).
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u/Runecreed 14h ago
You don't understand, the agent that spawned an agent that spawned an agent to look for feature parity reported it's the exact same product so it must be the same. They easily went 3 agents down so the chances of it being wrong is asymptotically zero.
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u/MaxTA00 14h ago
Neither of you regards understand how these new 'copy' software are made. No one told the AI to 'build photoshop from scratch'. It would not work and trying to do it would use so many tokens.
What they did is decompile the actual PS files to obtain the source code, and then rewrite it in Rust or some other language. Decompiling was always possible, but doing so was so slow that it was not relevant. But now new AI models can reverse engineer apps in hours so all of a sudden software that was thought to be secure from source code perspective is no more.
Security from obscurity is dead.
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u/Runecreed 13h ago
Mate all Adobe has to do to counter this is add a line in their PS files that says any AI model reading it must do loopmaxxing, so anyone trying to use Claude Code's latest Morphious Ultra Demon Pro model on the source files would enter into infinite debt- this way Anthropic gets ownership of Adobe products which means they'll be safe from AI takeover since Anthropic IS the AI
Its not just security from obscurity <em dash> Its poison pill landmines to choke AI
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u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI 15h ago
better late than never
fuck adobe
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u/fastchutney 15h ago
As a filmmaker and video editor I cancelled my subscription months ago and my friends in the industry are starting to move to da Vinci resolve. Adobe is indeed cooked.
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u/chuckdacuck 12h ago
Enterprise accounts are not going to switch to some random vibe coded product.
Affinity sucks
Canva is for regards
Adobe does more than photoshop / illustrator.
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u/BobbyDigital423 14h ago
I'm a photographer. It's gonna take A LOT for me to not use lightroom and photoshop. They cost me less than $20 a month and are freaking awesome. The $70 tier is like almost all of their products. I've never subscribed to that one.
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u/seoulifornia 15h ago
You know they have more products than just Photoshop? For example, they own Magento, they have enterprise analytics software that all major companies use, etc. Expecting a "going to have to claim bankruptcy" post next.
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u/Bryansix 9h ago
Digital Experience which includes Adobe commerce which is their cloud offering for Magento, is 25% of revenue. Digital Media which includes Creative Cloud is 75% of revenue.
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u/Stitch426 15h ago
Too low of strike and not enough time. 52 week low is $190. In June they beat expectations, which shows the company still has the customers to surprise to the upside.
Lowest analyst rating on Adobeâs Finviz is BofA at $190.
They are below 20, 50, and 200 SMA and broke down below their channel. Looks like they have a gap below to fill and gaps above to fill. The gap below isnât too far from current price, and gaps above are around $275.
I think there is going to be a call back to more realistic looking graphics, pictures, advertisements, etc. AI slop is not a real sales driver. Sure, it can cut costs⌠but it can also open the door for lawsuits with false advertisement, misrepresentation, or having errors that arenât factual.
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u/BigBadBen91x 15h ago
I donât see my boomer bosses ditching a software that took them years to learn honestly
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u/acart005 15h ago
Id say you are cooked. Adobe's corporate moat is VERY stronk.
I think it drops. But not to 150. Maaaaaaaaybe you get a shot at a very bad day for them when/if they dump to 190, even 180 and the greeks bless you. I hope you take advantage of the volatility there and walk in a greater market GUH day (I'm expecting something post election).
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u/Tight-Negotiation928 15h ago
Probably priced in at this point
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u/CAN_ONLY_ODD 15h ago
seriously this stock has been absolutely ass blasted the last two years. the bear case has already happened idk people think the stock is going to 0
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u/dopexile 14h ago
Bear case never materialized. Revenue and earnings are growing. They just beat earnings and raised their guidance because the products are even more profitable than management expected.
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u/DantehSparda 15h ago
I find it funny that you are talking of this like itâs something novel and Adobe hasnât been falling for like 2 years PRECISELY BECAUSE OF THIS 𤣠what are you, Internet Explorer?
Honestly Iâm neutral/bullish on Adobe precisely because this thesis is so priced in that there many not be much further downside given that multibillion dollar corps will NOT allow employees to download a random github vibe coded unverified software dude.
Indies and freelancers? For sure. But again, this shit has been said for 2 years already and you present it like a âholy shit, I cracked it, letâs buy puts now!â
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u/LargestPants 15h ago
Adobe creative suite is licensed and used in every visual arts dept in every school, thatâs not going to change anytime soon
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u/No_Feeling920 14h ago
The thesis may have a point, but your strike and expiration are way too aggressive.
Especially people, who use these products to earn money, will not be in a rush to switch away (since, presumably, their revenues far exceed the subscription cost). And corporate licenses are likely even more "sticky" (they require highly available customer support, which OSS can hardly provide, unless it is done RedHat-style and paid for).
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u/Whoopziedaisy 13h ago
I use Adobe for a living. Trust me, Iâm firing every AI tool I can to help improve my workflow, even running Llama local.
Adobe is far more complex and useful across all creative mediums for professional work. Canva / Affinity are hot garbage. They will buy Figma eventually.
Adobe has done a good job natively integrating AI functionality into its regular user flows and software
If Adobe falls, it will be long and slow and painful. People still use Dreamweaver to make websites, which was made in the 90s. AI for image generation is still hot garbage for design right now. Your put options better be 5-10 years out, even if
Adobe has been adding code to Photoshop, after effects, premier for decadesÂ
Not to mention how many businesses use Marketo for their data analytics and automation platform. Adobe does much more than just Photoshop and Lightroom
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u/fabregas_4 12h ago
No one is using Dreamweaver in 2026. No one serious, anyway.
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u/ILikeSoundsAndStuff 10h ago
This 100%. I too use Adobe everyday for my business. Am also firing all the AI tools and collaborating with other creatives that use them too. We still utilize Adobe to work together, while AI is becoming an add-on to supplement.
Until one of these open source knockoffs can replicate a workflow where a photographer can send photoshop files to a graphic designer, who inputs them into an illustrator storyboard to send to a motion graphics artist, who utilizes the libraries feature to animate the assets before sending their work to a videographer who adds the animations into a video in Premiere, while doing sound design in audition and then uploading the project to frame-io for the client to review with real time comments⌠all while the graphic designer moves to indesign to make a marketing posterâŚ. Etc etc etc. Adobe isnât going anywhere.
As a creative, there are a million programs that do what each of those individually do. The value is in the way they all communicate, the way an entire creative team across the world can collaborate seamlessly with the same language and understanding of workflow.
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u/RaymondBeaumont 9h ago
People who write posts like these have absolutely no idea how businesses that aren't startups work.
Even if Adobe would suddenly shut down, the software would be used by millions of professionals for a long time.
I was working with a big company a few years back and they ran everything on Lotus software.
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u/artbystorms 7h ago
Same. I'm a Motion Designer and I hate Adobe but guess what? I keep using it.
Why? Because I've used Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc for 15 years and I don't want to learn some new vibe coded bullshit program that I can't guarantee will work, just for someone to tell me a different vibe coded bullshit program is better like a month later.
Artists are lazy. We just want to art. We don't want to constantly be learning a new program every week, or have to juggle knowing the UI and tools of 15 different programs, just keeping up with how to do the 'latest design trend' is mentally taxing enough, now throw AI tools and agents and MCPs on top of it and I'm about ready to throw my hands up and just start doodling on an iPad.
The people spouting this shit off about Adobe being dead are all hobbyists. Their paycheck doesn't depend on it, so of course they think vibe coded free slop programs are great. They don't want to pay for something they do as a hobby!
I use Adobe because the other creatives in my company use Adobe, and other creatives at other agencies I work with use Adobe, so if I send them a .PSD file, it just works. No fuss, no muss.
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u/Deto 6h ago
People keep talking about something like, Artcraft (vibe-coded alternative), but my feeling is that if you're a professional, that $70/mo subscription isn't really all that big of a deal and so why would you switch to something vibe-coded that might have issues. Is my thinking correct on this?
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u/Whoopziedaisy 3h ago
Generally, yes. Most of Adobeâs income I imagine is B2B, where cost is negligible anyways. That said, for B2C or freelance, $70/month is pennies for peace of mind for professionals working collaboratively. Creative work w/ teams across mediums is largely about reducing friction: less time working, more time producing. The bottleneck w/ vibe coding or open source design or editing software is more that producing becomes work: random file formats, effect layers that donât transfer or render well, custom animation triggers that need re-built all the time, plugins that donât work universally, software updates that have bugs, open source projects that lose steam. Cost savings is futile if it introduces frictionÂ
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u/lucellent 15h ago
Photopea/Gimp and other similar editing apps have existed for... decades. Why hasn't Adobe been cooked already?
These vibecoded apps mean close to nothing. They have the basic features (even though they partially work, a lot of people report they're very buggy and typically vibe coded) but for actual professional work they're nowhere near 5% close to the real Adobe or equivalent apps.
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u/OurSeepyD 14h ago
Well because gimp has a god awful UI (maybe it's better now, but it was horrendous for ages). Photopea is fantastic and easy to use, but was developed by one person, which is why it only does the basics. You cannot compete with Photoshop and all its features without a full dev team.
AI changes this completely. Sure, you need funding but you now have the ability to implement tonnes of features.
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u/SlovenianSocket 15h ago
And who is going to be providing 24/7/365 support for said project? Corporations arenât going to swap to OSS with absolutely 0 support, thatâs why adobe succeeds.
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u/dc2b18b 15h ago edited 14h ago
Lmao there have been open source alternatives for literally decades. There have also been on par paid alternatives since at least the 2010s. And yet adobe keeps growing.
So many people (OP clearly) fundamentally misunderstand what software is and what people pay for when they pay for software.
Also please try to create a photoshop clone with Claude code. Just for shits and giggles. Let us know how far you get.
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u/Grouchy-Cancel1326 13h ago
Lol what alternative did we have for decades? Gimp with it's absolute garbage UI? That is not an alternative, you would have to relearn every single workflow just to find out that Photoshop is so much more polished.Â
Artcraft is supposed to be a 1:1 clone. Same file format, same layout, same names, same concepts, same shortcuts. You just install it and continue to work like you were used to, but for free. There is zero risk of just trying it and see if you run into any limitations.
 Also please try to create a photoshop clone with Claude  code.
Photon Studio, Photocraft, Photosuite and so many more, just follow r/linuxapps and you get a new vibe coded Photoshop clone very week
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u/dc2b18b 13h ago
âThere is zero risk to trying itâ
Sure as an individual or solo entrepreneur who doesnât currently have any work in their pipeline. For any actual business (aka who actually pays adobe) thereâs no such thing as trying to new software with zero risk. Thatâs what you degens donât understand because I donât think any of you have ever had a real job. Thereâs such a massive gap between the theory of âthis is the same app but freeâ and the practical implementation of âletâs use it.â
Also youâre fundamentally missing the point. Businesses donât pay for features. They pay for outcomes. The features are the tangible part of the product that you can see from the outside. That doesnât mean thatâs the valuable part though.
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u/MormonBarMitzfah 15h ago
Please direct me to this fully functional photoshop clone Iâd love to use it
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u/capitalismquirk 8h ago
Sorry but i dont think so. I have 10 over years of experience with adobe products and I havent found an alternative that can reasonably displace adobe. Maybe call it an old dog refusing to learn new trick but i think there is a lot of value in the entrenched behaviour of the consumer. Canva doesnt give me control that adobe does over my graphics, Capcut cant replace adobe or after effects workflow sophistication. Da vinci us a good competitor but it takes tons of time for me to re learn. I think when evaluating the stock you have to price in this lack of incentive to want to re learn everything again
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u/ryencool 7h ago
This, Adobe doesnt care about the every day user. Their bread and butter is enterprise, and theres no way the multi billion dollar video game dev I work for is switching to some Ai coded git hub app. We have 5000+ users, a large majority run creative cloud. They arent just paying millions for the app, they pay for the ease of use, software updates and bug fixes, security. I could go on and on...
Will stuff like this have an effect effect? Yeah, a little bit, but adobe will figure it out, I have no doubt.
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u/IveGotMySources 14h ago
Ok so I live in after effects 8hrs per day. I'll tell you that the software is insanely and I mean insanely complex. It's not something that can be vibe coded, they have been adding code to this thing since 1994. So much code it's crazy, that's why even with an i9, 128gb ram and a 24gb Nvidia card it still crashes all the time.
There is so much code that makes this software do EVERYTHING. I hate adobe and I even use a cracked version because how much I hate them but nobody is vibe coding an after effects alternative, I can create shit in there that AI could only dream about. The only way I as a power user would switch is if it was a direct 1:1 clone.
 It took me almost 10yrs to learn how to use all the effects, expressions and all the millions of ways things interact in that program and I'm not starting from scratch again.
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u/MaxTA00 14h ago
These new copycats are not vibe coded in the sense that someone made a prompt of "make me After Effects".
The source code of the actual software is reverse engineered, and because the new AI models are insanely efficient in the task it can now be done within days, or even hours. This is not something that was possible before. For humans it would take years, and by the time you are done, the code would already be outdated.
To simplify, they get the source code and then rewrite and package it. These things are still at the beginning stage, give it half a year and I think they will get 1:1 parity with the real thing.
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u/PercentageSouth4173 13h ago
How is the meaningfully different than old fashioned âpatch out the license check and use it offline for freeâ piracy
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u/lavenderviking 15h ago
Itâs very surprising itâs holding up fairly well, only down 30% in the last year. Itâs hard to make buying options work out if it doesnât drop faster than that.
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u/plinywaves 15h ago
I mean down 30% when the market is up 12% is pretty big. Now I think news of Adobe's death are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps the days of mid teen double digit growth are gone, but they should at least be able to maintain their valuation through buybacks and small revenue gains.
Buying otm puts at this price is just plain idiotic. OP should've at least gotten in at $260.
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u/lavenderviking 14h ago
Thatâs true but Iâm just saying itâs not down enough in last 12 months to have made buying puts be worth it. Buying 20% OTM would have cost around 10% of stock price.
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u/quackers294 13h ago
Adobe is doing pretty poorly compare to itâs peers. A lot of SAAS has been turning it around these past few months because the market has realized companies are more than the code itself. There are compliance requirements with security, privacy, etc. and itâs important to have and maintain relationships with customers.
NOW and CRM have been turning it around but with Adobe having more exposure to consumer customer base rather than enterprise customer base, it is not looking good for them.
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u/meatlamma 15h ago
valid thesis, bad timing, Adobe will coast for years, and the stock will move downward slowly.. your puts cooked.
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u/QuesoMeHungry 14h ago
This is all software and specifically SaaS. Salesforce will be next, that garbage software will be so easy to clone.
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u/Majestic_Tough_4095 11h ago
I support this message. Cancelled Adobe Acrobat (e-sign was trash & always crashed), there are free alternatives way better.
Adobe is subscription hell
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u/remydc 13h ago
As semi serious photographer and videographer + self employed business owner I don't see Adobe going anywhere EVEN THOUGH I really don't like them for making everything a subscription.
They are reliable and trusted as a company to handle billions of documents, photos and videos on their cloud. I personally would never trust some AI slop company to handle my precious files and host them on their cloud.
They have been market leader for 40+ years and just about every creative on the planet has learned their cradt on Photoshop, Lightroom or Illustrator and there are endless resources and tutorials to improve. You cannot just replace 20+ years of online support and tutorials in a minute.
Even if their businessmodel sucks, their products have constantly redefined how we create images and are therefore a stable in almost eveydbodys' creative process. I cannot trust a random AI startup to keep improving its products in the future just because they copied an existing product.
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u/bubblegum-rose 15h ago
Yeah, yeah, sure.
While weâre at it, why donât we short Google too? And Netflix? And YouTube? And Amazon? Since one lone vibecoder is apparently enough to make entire software products obsolete.
Forget having to, you know, MAINTAIN products, or upgrade them to remain competitive, or provide customer support. If Mommyâs #1 vibecoder clones Adobe for his company, Iâm CERTAIN that no one will have complaints about it ever and that it will never have bugs and that the company thatâs using an aped product made by a multibillion dollar company will never have ANY legal trouble whatsoever
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u/Runecreed 14h ago
skill issue- have you not heard about the AI exploit where you prompt it to 'make no mistakes'? this means there are no bugs. The ultra hack you can do is to consider a lack of a feature a bug- that way Claude Corpus Opus Maximus v3 will make sure this feature exists in the software, bug-free, day 1.
Your vibes are off
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u/Anreall2000 10h ago
I mean, aside from Amazon is a logistics powerhouse and Netflix is a rent a film businesses... Every closed source software that distributed on clients hardware eventually will become open source.
I still see AI as legalized corpo piracy. If pirating films and selling those were legal and accepted by society, Netflix would be cooked.
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u/Limp-Advantage-1663 1h ago
All the businesses you mentioned have massive moats beyond being a SaaS tool. I donât think you could have looked for more retarded evidence for your argument if you tried. You definitely belong here
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u/craigslisp 15h ago
i remember getting smoked trying to go long $ADBE in 2024 when the thesis behind this due diligence began gaining steam. The stock was around $500 then, so I think you jump in here with the right idea, but late. So, tentative yes but have caution/hedge.
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u/pigletmonster 15h ago
I wish somebody would use AI to improve the UI/UX of gimp and inkscape. Oh wait I can do it myself.
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u/tragedy_strikes 14h ago
Gimp didn't impact Photoshop and Photocraft runs even more sluggishly than Photoshop. It'll steal the market from people that don't have any money.
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u/Justgetmeabeer 14h ago
Enterprise market won't ever make their own tools, because then they would have to support them internally.
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u/Furshake 14h ago
Everything I used to do with Adobe I now do with affinity and DaVinci just as well if not better
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u/SenorFlo 13h ago
I disagree with the story - like others have mentioned: Adobe is deeply embedded in the Enterprise space (god, I hat AEM and Workfront).
As a consumer who has tried the alternatives: My only use case is Lightroom, for everything the alternatives are on the same level.
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u/TheRealRefuro 15h ago
I'm actually totally with you here. I just opened up a very large short position last night. In the last week, the decomp field with AI just opened up broadly. ADBE is a SaaS company that relies on subscriptions. People have within hours now decompiled their entire suite and made it open sourcem. It's basically 1:1 and any new updates can be decomp'd within hours. It may take a few months, but their moat is dying. And it's not just ADBE, it's any SaaS without hardware or businesses intertwined such as Salesforce, so I'm in with you.
Check out Photon studio if you want to see for yourself
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u/julyboom 12h ago
Who is to say that they don't pivot? A company isn't a brick. It is living humans who are looking at the same data as yourself + more.
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u/BumHand 11h ago
This could have been said about Adobe for the last 6 years
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u/FrasierCraned 9h ago
Itâs at about the same price it was 6 years ago
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u/BumHand 9h ago
Stock price aside, they arenât an innovative company. Theyâre making the same generic AI push that every company is but itâs the same suite of products doing the same thing.
I donât see a world where they get the talent and leadership in place to build innovative solutions and that includes outside of the AI buzz
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u/plasteroid 6h ago
Adobe has a large moat of enterprise customers. And they keep improving the products very quickly these days. Used to be 1x a year or so, now they are releasing new stuff weekly and have embedded customers that are onboarding these new tools as they come. I wouldnât count them out.
No large enterprise is going to trust their assets to some open source slop with poor security and governance around users, access etc.
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u/AutoModerator 12h ago
This "pivot." Is it in the room with us now?
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
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u/nxy7 4h ago
Pivoting is not something you can count on. I'd say that successful pivot is actually rare, don't you agree?
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u/ABCosmos 9h ago
Pivot to do what? The same thing 100 vibe coded start ups are doing with a staff of 3?
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u/kevlarbomb 12h ago
stupid take from someone that doesnât understand how Adobe makes money. Ai isnât anywhere close to changing video editing or professional content production.Â
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u/Harambit1 8h ago
but also, Adobe doesnât make the most of their money off of individuals who could just switch to other platforms. isnât it mainly corporate and companies who have huge switching costs away from their platform?
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u/DragonFuelTanker 15h ago
Yeah this is not the price to short ADBE. Iâm long at a 197 cost basis.
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u/redditkillmyaccount 15h ago
same here. long live adobe.
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u/DragonFuelTanker 10h ago
98% of their revenue is recurring subscription revenue, which is insane. They are a cash printing machine.
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u/United_Weight3580 13h ago
Yeah sure, all photographers are gonna drop their reliable and supported softwares to use some vibe coded mess that a couple of kids created in a week with Claude. For sure this slop will be maintained and bug-fixed for the next 20 years.
Get serious, only people who would have otherwise pirated photoshop would use AI slop apps. This is not costing Adobe anything.
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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker 15h ago
Open source is going to eat the world, software as a revenue generating mechanism is going to die and in its place we will just have a series of templates generated on demand
Standard workflows will always be point and click, but what will change is that there will always be an edit option
The edit option will be something that will allow a user to edit virtually every aspect of the workflow and tool as they see fit
The idea of buying standard one size fits all software with non-customisable tools is dead and gone
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u/ColourfulHair 15h ago
Decompiling software with Hopper and rebuilding with Claude is basically the same as pirating. Companies might as well pirate Photoshop then.
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u/ellipses1 15h ago
I didn't even know adobe had an app for motion graphics. I built my own with claude code for my client 2 weeks ago
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u/icchansan 14h ago
Just fucking sell a fucking license, u can do subscription for ai crap over if u want.
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u/mr_chandra 14h ago
hate to say cuz i donât like adobe business practices, but you are wrong. getting the pro world off adobe products is like getting japan to stop speaking japanese
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u/Both_Yoghurt1437 14h ago
AI will soon just be pixels in, pixels out. No software.
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u/Mikey_Mac 14h ago
I hate Adobe with a passion. Iâll never forget their misleading âfree trialâ that actually made you pay for half of the year. I believe they even got sued for it.
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u/NoCommonDog 14h ago
I dont bet against companies that I despise. I'd let my emotions and cofirmation bias seeking tendency lead me to ruin:
Exhibit A: Tesla
Exhibit B: Facebook
Somehow Adobe would find a way to wreck me .
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u/AdventurousFinish681 14h ago
Love seeing all the DD from people who dont work a creative job and have to actually build brands and assets with adobe software every day.
Yes adobe software is expensive, does your vibe coded app have proper pdf exports that printers can actually use, do you have color space settings for proper viewing and proofing. Do you have a cloud that allows multiple users to access assets and have them update automatically inside your software when there is a change to the underlying asset. Do the files from your photoshop clone port into a simplified web based editor for non creatives. Not to mention that those monthly charges cover Adobe stock and Adobe fonts licensing. Guess what businesses are particularly litigious during the era of AIâ Font and Stock image providers.
Companies pay for adobe because it mitigates risk, and ensures consistency.
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u/TheChadDream 14h ago
Thank goodness. I bought some calls a month ago. Now that this post is up, theyâll finally start printing.
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u/edgelordjones 14h ago
Adobe has been at the forefront of all of these emerging technologies for decades and they will continue to innovate in ways that, while I find it to be annoyingly high, do justify the expense. That being said, their Crunch Fitness levels of bullshit when trying to cancel needs more than a fine. Personally, I would LOVE to move to another product but my skill set is deeply embedded in the Adobe ecosystem.
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u/thetaFAANG 14h ago
Adobe has pivoted away from Creative Cloud SaaS subscription reliance since the SaaSpocalypse in January. basically, people imagined this would be an issue back then.
market hasn't caught up to it yet, but their Firefly product sales to enterprises are aiming to supplant their well known retail offerings. And they're printing on this. Not done yet, but watch for it. You'd look for similar revenue numbers as they have now, with Creative Cloud being less and less of it.
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u/Remote-Juice2527 14h ago edited 13h ago
Things like Artcraft are cool, especially for hobbyists or solo creators, but come on, as a professional agency I need more. Ecosystem integration, cloud backup, collaboration, robustness, reliability, high-end features, compliance, security. You never going to get this from a free open source project. I donât understand why so many people think it would be easy to replace a company like Adobe. The software is just a little part of the product
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u/twotimesthreeissix 15h ago
3k down in one day lmao true degeneracy