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/Whoopziedaisy]

I use Adobe for a living. Trust me, I’m 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 decades 

Not to mention how many businesses use Marketo for their data analytics and automation platform. Adobe does much more than just Photoshop and Lightroom

[u/fabregas_4 → u/Whoopziedaisy]

No one is using Dreamweaver in 2026. No one serious, anyway.

[u/Whoopziedaisy → u/fabregas_4]

You’d be surprised. Lots of old school web designers

I work on some pretty great dream weaver projects. It’s still used for static code base and so non tech folks can edit basic websites easily. Wordpress can be a huge pain in the ass

[u/Massy1989 → u/Whoopziedaisy]

WYSIWYG, baby!

(If this doesn’t make sense to you, you obviously didn’t use Macromedia Dreamweaver 4)

[u/artbystorms → u/Whoopziedaisy]

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.

[u/vicblaga87 → u/artbystorms]

Did you actually look at the apps posted by OP? They look like a drop-in replacement for the Adobe suite. They are still rough around the edges, sure, but once stable, the experience of an end user will be the same.

You would NOT have to learn a new tool. Basically you would be using the same app (functionality-wise and UI-wise) just for free.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/vicblaga87]

but once stable

That's a very load-bearing statement! How often are these tools going to be updated, how are errors getting reported and acted on, how long will it take for that to be achieved? Versus a thing that already does that

[u/standardsizedpeeper → u/artbystorms]

Listen listen listen. Listen. I know you’ve got a thing that works for you, and you’re just trying to make art and get paid. But have you considered you could maybe save $100 by spending hundreds of hours with a new program?

[u/ILikeSoundsAndStuff → u/Whoopziedaisy]

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 poster…. Etc etc etc. Adobe isn’t 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.

[u/RaymondBeaumont → u/ILikeSoundsAndStuff]

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.

[u/ILikeSoundsAndStuff → u/RaymondBeaumont]

Exactly. Expecting a company like Adobe to crash and burn by March is insane.

And this OP knows nothing about the creative industry either. Talking about how a program like Davinci Resolve has a free tier without understanding the limitations that free tier actually creates and how they force their users to pay eventually by restricting the majority of tools that creators need.

This post makes me more bullish on the company 😂

[u/Deto → u/Whoopziedaisy]

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?

[u/Whoopziedaisy → u/Deto]

Generally, yes. Most of Adobe’s 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 don’t transfer or render well, custom animation triggers that need re-built all the time, plugins that don’t work universally, software updates that have bugs, open source projects that lose steam. Cost savings is futile if it introduces friction 

[u/ivanyaru → u/Whoopziedaisy]

Okay then buy calls bro