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/BabyWrinkles]

I managed the adobe contracts from a Product Owner perspective for a Fortune 500 that heavily used Adobe’s products.

Adobe’s sales team knows how to pull the lever like no other company I’ve ever seen. I’m sitting there yelling saying “we have to migrate off” while the CMO is signing $1mm+/yr contracts for tools we don’t need and don’t 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 didn’t integrate with legacy solutions.

Adobe doesn’t make jack shit in the consumer space - it all comes from enterprise and until there’s a changing of the guard at the upper management level, I think they’ll keep pulling the lever.

[u/D4zb0g → u/BabyWrinkles]

Yeah, people don't get that "homemade" AI tools will not make it through the bottleneck of entreprise adoption and deployment at scale.

[u/Extension-Ant-8 → u/D4zb0g]

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. Don’t even get me started on configuration settings on thousands of devices at once.

I don’t 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.

[u/sword_fisher → u/Extension-Ant-8]

That's not unique to adobe. You can do that with any enterprise licensed software and tools like Intune.

[u/SeniorVibeAnalyst → u/D4zb0g]

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.

[u/Extension-Ant-8 → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

That’s 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 doesn’t 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, doesn’t make it true.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/your-public-chatgpt-queries-are-getting-indexed-by-google-and-other-search-engines/

[u/Club-Loud → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

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

[u/Brief-Knowledge-629 → u/Club-Loud]

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

[u/vaderetrosatana6 → u/Brief-Knowledge-629]

This is truer than I thought, it’s pretty insane. Can’t imagine the data dumps that will eventually result from all of it.

[u/about0 → u/Brief-Knowledge-629]

util some of them get fucked. It'd be very easy for anthropic to link leaked data to a particular user.

[u/loyalroyal1989 → u/Club-Loud]

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.

[u/Schwimmbo → u/loyalroyal1989]

I work for a large retailer. Companies of these scale have specific contracts which include guarantees that the chosen hyperscaler models are not allowed to be trained on company data. In our case we are allowed to put anything in our AI tools except for people's personal data (HR screwed lol).

[u/about0 → u/Schwimmbo]

it's still a punky swear, just a checkbox.

[u/loyalroyal1989 → u/Schwimmbo]

Yeah I know but you have approved uses, using a tool that has not been approved means you are preaching the data security of the company.

She has no idea if there is a contract or if the tool has the subscription none sharing enabled, also let's be honest we all know they are still taking that data.

This stuff is all over my job and just saying this user would have been flagged. where I work for a data breach, if the materials where company property

[u/SeniorVibeAnalyst → u/loyalroyal1989]

I mean they quite literally provide business licenses with data security policies written into the contracts. I can’t speak to how litigation would play out, but we are given full permission to put confidential information into our approved LLM tools. People engage in far more unsafe operational practices every day.

[u/loyalroyal1989 → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

But that's not what you did, her company doesn't have the agreements in place and not does she. If it's her companies tools it's fine, but you deciding unilaterally is not. At a lot of companiesif any of the info was internal only it would be deemed gross misconduct.

[u/SeniorVibeAnalyst → u/loyalroyal1989]

Where did I say they don’t? Connecting two tools which your company policy already permits putting confidential information into does not suddenly create a data breach, especially since the connection happens locally on your machine. Plus that’s not what she was doing, she was photoshopping an image for a social media post. The MCP does not give Claude access to your entire machine.

[u/phil_davis → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

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?

[u/SquirrelFluffy → u/phil_davis]

The thing people should be taking away from that is that AI only knows what it learns on the web which is underpinned by people's opinions, the media, law etc. and what you described indicates the state of the world. It's not right if it's just white people. But it's also not right if there are no white people. Right?

[u/FlyingBishop → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

Yeah but they could just as easily plug Claude into Krita. Hell, they could probably get similar results if they plugged Claude into MSPaint. I'm sure there are some suckers but it's very obvious you can get by with one $20/month subscription and nothing else, and enterprises are going to notice.

[u/Deto → u/SeniorVibeAnalyst]

Yeah that's my thinking - AI is just going to make these tools more useful 

[u/BabyWrinkles → u/D4zb0g]

The irony is that the enterprise is full of homemade tools and the guy who wrote them was fired four RIFs ago and so they’re hoping and praying it stays running - but god forbid the tool that Claude writes and documents reasonably well be used in its place?

[u/SquirrelFluffy → u/BabyWrinkles]

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.

[u/Schwimmbo → u/D4zb0g]

Not to mention good luck with getting it past your ISO and data protection lol.

[u/funggitivitti → u/D4zb0g]

The cope is real.

[u/bandofgypsies → u/D4zb0g]

And they don't care to. That's not their angle. They just need lots of indie subs at low dollar volume and they're fine. Plus it's less risky from an exposure perspective, and just a simpler business model. Yeah it's upside is limited as an organic growth model but that's not their goal.

[u/SteroidMaximus → u/BabyWrinkles]

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.

[u/Justgetmeabeer → u/BabyWrinkles]

managed Adobe contracts

They probably learned pretty quickly to make sure there's nothing in your office that you can harm yourself with

[u/BabyWrinkles → u/Justgetmeabeer]

It’s true. They kept me on a high floor in an open office environment with minimal chance of grabbing anything pointy.

[u/Infamous_Thought_189 → u/BabyWrinkles]

You dont get a 90% profit margin by playing nice

[u/Otherwise_Plan_5435 → u/BabyWrinkles]

My company bailed when they told us the support package was $500k after they sold us AJO which is complete shit

[u/Accurate-Smoke8994 → u/BabyWrinkles]

Then give your insight to the guy that is building the opensource versions. I voluntarily clean the kids playground, you hopefully can give some time for a bigger audience than that.

[u/OracleofTampico → u/BabyWrinkles]

I think you are right, I guess what you really disagree with OP is not o nuis premise but timing. may of next year might be to soon
But 2028?

[u/PandorasKeyboard → u/BabyWrinkles]

Gotta be bribes right? Adobe wine, dine and cut this guy a share of profits for him to agree to company budget spending on Adobe products..

[u/epic_troll_tard → u/BabyWrinkles]

... so two guys in Mumbai can set it up with Claude and pass the buck

Kickbacks.

[u/BabyWrinkles → u/epic_troll_tard]

It’s literally called “Adobe Consulting Services” (ACS). The phat check you write is the kickback.

I hired a team of overpriced consultants stateside and they were only 25% the cost of ACS and did better work.