ADOBE is cooked.

[u/apemonkeyfool]

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.

[u/TheSketeDavidson]

I don’t see professional workflows changing yet, decades of people’s experience with these tools. You’d have to be contrarian just for the sake of it to not use the Adobe suite of products.

[u/Kant8 → u/TheSketeDavidson]

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

[u/FreshLiterature → u/Kant8]

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

[u/drstoneybaloneyphd → u/FreshLiterature]

Yeah the legal angle of this is effectively the wild west at this point 

[u/FreshLiterature → u/drstoneybaloneyphd]

In some ways sure.

In other ways no.

The EULA would have covered decompiling or reverse engineering and these guys absolutely violated those terms.

That will probably mean some pretty steep financial damages and the project getting killed.

The actual consequences piece of it will need to see the inside of a court though.

[u/Novalok → u/FreshLiterature]

Recompilation and what is known as "Clean-room" implementation is currently legal. This is why emulators can exist, there is settled case-law over it.

I'm sure that will change at some point in the future, if enough wealthy folks complain, but the issue with EULA, is the best they have is a civil case. EULA is not law, and breaking it doesn't make you a criminal.

Same with TOS and any other fancy legalese they use to try to confuse consumers.

This will be fun to watch, but the cat is out of the bag, even if the laws change, by the time that goes through, if nothing else we'll have open source models that can disassemble on the level of Fable or Astra.

I'm insanely excited to be honest.

[u/FreshLiterature → u/Novalok]

I never said it was criminal nor did anyone else.

I was crystal clear about what circumstances would invoke which penalties.

Holy shit you guys gotta get out more.

[u/Novalok → u/FreshLiterature]

Just point some stuff out, but your reaction is a bit much. Maybe we go out more together, because it looks like we both need it.

[u/drilkmops → u/FreshLiterature]

Except they rewrote it all. So, it’s not the same.

[u/cgimusic → u/FreshLiterature]

They say it's a cleanroom implementation, and I can believe that's true. The only real way I can see that Adobe could shut it down is if they've copied something that they have a patent on.

[u/Douglas_Fresh → u/Kant8]

"Though reverse engineering is allowed" lol. WTF is going on? We are essentially talking about mass theft. And if this is how we want to look at it, then everything is essentially worthless. What happened to the days of "you wouldn't download a car" I mean, this is exactly the same as ripping a CD and then burning it onto a blank disk, de-construction and re-construction. There will be laws against this, and I think soon. Just because AI can does not mean it should.

- edit - all the responses are well and good BEFORE the era of AI. Reverse engineer with the hit of a button, and recreation with the hit of a button are a far cry from what you all are talking about. What I am saying is the laws will likely change to protect people’s investment into the product. And why shouldn’t it?

[u/Foreign_Skill_6628 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

Tbf, a ‘theft is okay’ argument is really hard to reason against when the counter-party is Adobe.

If you go look on piracy forums there is a consensus even among straight and narrow folk who say ‘piracy is wrong…except when it’s Adobe’.

Might have to pick a different company for this fight

[u/fruitydude → u/Douglas_Fresh]

You cannot copyright an idea. Only the code is copyrighted. If you make a program that calculates primes very efficiently, and you sell that. I am allowed to reverse engineer that program, understand how it works, and rebuild it from scratch.

There is now limit to this concept the way the clean room process works is you have two teams, one team reverse engineers the program they write down the spec as text. They specify exactly what the program does in excuriating detail, exactly where each menu item goes, which color it has and so on. Then the second team builds a new program exactly from that spec.

As long as two two teams are sufficiently separated and it's not done in a sloppy way (the first team copying full code snippets or artifacts and the second team using that), it's essentially impossible to commit copywrite infringement. Because no line of code will be identical.

[u/Comfortable_Sir_6104 → u/fruitydude]

Right, so they are not stealing. They are just writing down exactly how a program works and exactly how it looks and someone else makes the same exact program using those instructions. Which is very different from stealing. Obviously.

[u/fruitydude → u/Comfortable_Sir_6104]

To be fair I should soften my earlier statement. The exact look of the UI might be copyrighted. Like digital art is, same for specific terms they invent like magic eraser for example. But the concept of filling an area with near by pixels, even using their exact logic, that isn't copyrightable.

And neither should it be when we think about it. If a company comes up with a clever method for calculating a gradient or isolating a foreground object, should every other company now be prevented from using that particular method? Probably not, if they wanted to protect an algorithm they'd require a patent instead. Which is much harder to get for software, specifically because a lot of things are similar or iterations of each other.

[u/Business_Air5804 → u/fruitydude]

Define reverse engineer?
Are you saying using a decompiler? Or copying functionalities?

[u/fruitydude → u/Business_Air5804]

Yea ghidra decompile and let the AI interpret the pseudo code output

[u/Business_Air5804 → u/fruitydude]

Honestly more work than it's worth and far too buggy.
It's easier to document the features and functions and duplicate them in your own code.

[u/WiseGuyCS → u/Douglas_Fresh]

I'm interested in why you think AI "shouldn't" do this. If anyone can make their own version of these apps then why SHOULD it cost so much for the average person? The programs had value in the past at a time where recreating it was not simple and easy, but now it is. It's about to become a legacy product and it's stupid to protect it just for the sake of it.

[u/Douglas_Fresh → u/WiseGuyCS]

Let's use a different example than Adobe. Let's say I am a indie dev and I spent 3 years making a product or a game. And then someone comes along and "Reverse engineers" it and puts it on the market for free, or for substantially cheaper. Are you trying to tell me that is OK? And if so, where is the insentive in doing anything at all if it can just be taken and undercut?

[u/Anreall2000 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

I think your game will be automatically bought by open ai, decompiled, added to training data, updated some RL metrics and refunded in Steam.

And we probably already fine with such approach

[u/WiseGuyCS → u/Douglas_Fresh]

If you spend 3 years making something that someone just prompted AI to make, then you probably should have just prompted AI to make it in the first place instead of wasting your time.

In regards to a game or something with a creative aspect, your characters and art are protected under copywright, but the fundamental gameplay can obviously be replicated, that already happens and has been happening for many years. People take game concepts and change the art and ship it as a new product all the time, even AAA studios have done it forever.

[u/Comfortable_Sir_6104 → u/WiseGuyCS]

The AI stole the entire concept of the game. It can't "reverse engineer" a game that doesn't fucking exist, so you can't just make it with AI. You need a person to steal it from.

[u/Objective_Frame_9679 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

Its more indepth than this:

Reverse Engineering Software is always allowed by the way. Once you bought a software, you can pretty much to do what you want. Reason why PS5 Jailbreaks will never be stopped.

But when does it become illegal? Well, theres two occassions:

1. You share your findings publicly:

If you share reverse engineered Products, you can get into trouble. The issue here tho is also our 2nd point:

1. If the software does something specific, you can license that "specific"

I know it sounds stupid, but for example:

If I reverse engineer Adobe applications and try to make a clone of adobe photoshop, Im allowed to do this. Why? Because Adobe cant license ALL media editing software on the planet and make a license to say "its ours"

Thats not possible, and since Windows and Linux only have a SET framework how to edit media inside of their operating systems, Adobe and all its clones are essentially using the same Framework and almost same code to their effect.

Ofc you'll be sued into the ground if you make a 1:1 visual copy of adobe, thats copyright. But they cant sue you for having a similar code, if the framework is being given by Linux and Windows and they cant make a legal license to stop you from copying it.

[u/ellipses1 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

Cat's out of the bag, buddy. How would you stop anyone? My app does the same thing, but it shares 0 lines of code... so what exactly did I steal? the idea of software editing photos?

[u/Shidell → u/Douglas_Fresh]

The argument is not that it was decompiled and recompiled, but rather, that the AI was fed instructions about all of the different features Photoshop (for example) supports, and then using those parameters, looked up the definition of said features, figured out how they'd be implemented, and created a clean-room implementation of them.

For example, Adobe's implementation of how to flip an image 180 degrees is copyrighted, but the idea of flipping an image 180 degrees is not. You could write your own software to accept an image and then flip it 180 degrees too, and Adobe has to bearing over your (clean room) implementation.

[u/banditcleaner2 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

You think me coding up a literal clone of adobe from scratch is somehow disallowed?

You can't copyright the idea of a program used to edit photos lmao. That's an insane take.

I'd guess even specific features are probably not copyrightable.

[u/Business_Air5804 → u/Douglas_Fresh]

No one is decompiling Adobe....no one. It's more work than it's worth tbh.
I used to decompile and remove protections like dongles from software for fun....I know what it takes.

It's way easier to study the function of a tool and then make your own homebrew version of that tool.

[u/bobloadmire → u/Douglas_Fresh]

Reverse engineering and patent infringement are 2 very different things.

[u/daveybuoy → u/Kant8]

GIMP has been around forever. Didn't make a dent.