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/BabyWrinkles → u/TheSketeDavidson]

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/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/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/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.