Has AI Just Broken the Software Subscription Model?

If you run a small business, edit the family photos or use a computer for work, there is a good chance you pay a monthly fee for at least one program. It was not always like this. Software used to come in a box: you paid once, and it was yours for as long as your computer would run it. Over the past decade or so, most of the big names switched to subscriptions instead. Adobe's last boxed Creative Suite came out in 2012, and from 2013 every new version was available only through a Creative Cloud subscription. Microsoft has steadily nudged Office users towards Microsoft 365 in much the same way.

For the companies, subscriptions are wonderful: a steady, predictable income that keeps arriving whether or not anything new is added. For customers, the deal is murkier. Adobe's full Creative Cloud Pro plan lists at US$69.99 a month in the United States, and people on an annual plan paid monthly who try to leave part-way through can be charged a fee of up to half of whatever is left on the contract. That fee is where this story starts.

One developer, seven Adobe apps

Brandon Thomas is a software developer with around fifteen years of experience, including three years as chief executive of a startup called Storyteller.ai. By his own account, his relationship with Adobe soured a long time ago. "They charged me the 'cancellation fee' on multiple occasions and I've hated them ever since," he wrote on Reddit.

His answer is ArtCraft, a collection of free apps designed to stand in for Adobe's own. PhotoCraft takes on Photoshop, VectorCraft takes on Illustrator, FilmCraft is a Premiere Pro alternative and LightCraft covers Lightroom. EffectCraft is modelled on After Effects, DesignCraft on InDesign, and there is a PDF tool in the spirit of Acrobat. They are written in Rust, a modern programming language known for being fast and reliable, with Anthropic's Claude AI (the Opus 5.5 model) writing much of the code under his direction. The project's website also lists early alternatives to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AutoCAD and the Pro Tools audio studio, so this is not just about Adobe.

The apps cost nothing, need no account, and run on Windows, Mac and Linux. That last one is notable, because Adobe has never released its creative apps for Linux at all. Most of them will also run inside a web browser. Within days, tens of thousands of developers had starred PhotoCraft on GitHub, the website where most open-source projects live. Thomas summed up his own view in three words: "Software is over."

First, what does "open source" actually mean?

Every program starts life as source code: the instructions a programmer writes, in a language people can read and edit. Before you can run it, that code is converted, or "compiled", into machine code, a long string of instructions meant for your computer's processor rather than for human eyes. Think of the source code as a recipe and the program you install as the finished cake. Normally, a software company sells you the cake and keeps the recipe locked in a vault.

Open source has been around for decades, and a huge share of the internet quietly runs on it. What has always held it back on the desktop is sheer effort. Photoshop represents more than thirty years of work by large, well-paid teams, and volunteer projects have struggled to keep pace. That is the gap AI coding tools are now trying to close.

Is it actually any good?

Not yet, and its creator says as much. ArtCraft's apps are labelled "early alpha" or "in development", and Thomas admitted on the programmers' forum Hacker News that they are "not anywhere close to ready." Having first promised to match all of Adobe's features within a month, he has since revised that to 99% within months rather than years. PhotoCraft's own roadmap estimates it currently covers roughly a quarter to a third of what a professional needs day to day.

Early testing backs that up. PhotoCraft is the furthest along. It opens and saves Photoshop's PSD files, has layers, masks and dozens of filters, and copies Photoshop's menus and keyboard shortcuts so closely that reviewers at AppleInsider called the experience "the uncanny valley, but for user interfaces." Other testers found basic tools like the lasso and colour correction worked as expected, while Free Transform behaved erratically. The Linux news site OMG! Ubuntu pointed out that the resemblance is largely skin deep: tools with the same names and icons do not necessarily behave the same way or produce the same results. FilmCraft is rougher again. One well-known tech YouTuber who tried to edit a real video with it ran into laggy playback and transitions nowhere near Premiere's quality, and concluded it simply was not good enough yet.

So nobody earning a living in Premiere should be cancelling this week. But judging ArtCraft only on how good it is today misses the point. The real story is how little time and money it took to get this far.

The bigger shift: reverse engineering for everyone

The second piece of news is arguably the more important one.

Reverse engineering means working backwards from a finished product to understand how it was made: tasting the cake and working out the recipe. For software, that usually involves "decompiling" a program, translating its machine code back into something resembling human-readable code. None of this is new. In the early 1980s, Compaq and Phoenix Technologies recreated the IBM PC's start-up software using a "clean room" approach: one team studied how IBM's software behaved and wrote a description of it, then a separate team who had never seen IBM's code wrote new software to match. That is a big part of the reason "IBM-compatible" PCs from dozens of manufacturers ended up on desks all over the world. But it has always been slow, painstaking work for specialists.

On 7 October, a free tool called REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, was released and shot to the top of GitHub's trending chart within a day. REA does not do the decompiling itself. It connects AI coding assistants to established professional tools such as Ghidra, a reverse engineering suite the US National Security Agency released to the public in 2019. You point it at an installed program, ask how a particular feature works, and the AI does the digging, handing back a rough reconstruction of the logic along with the evidence for its conclusions. From there, an AI coding assistant can write a fresh version of that feature from scratch. It works on everything from Windows and Mac programs to Android apps and device firmware.

Some of the excitement online has turned into claims that every app is now effectively open source, whether it wants to be or not. That goes too far. What comes out is educated guesswork, not the original recipe, and REA's own makers do not claim it recovers original source code or clones whole applications. What has changed is how much skill it takes to understand the inner workings of a closed program, and that has dropped dramatically.

It is worth being clear that the two stories are separate. Thomas describes ArtCraft as a clean-room reimplementation, built from public information and the way Adobe's apps behave, without using any of Adobe's code. Some coverage has loosely described it as reverse engineered, but nobody has independently verified exactly how it was made either way.

A rough year for Adobe

All of this lands on a company that was already having a difficult 2026.

In June 2024, the US Department of Justice sued Adobe, alleging it buried that early termination fee in the fine print and made cancelling unnecessarily difficult. In March this year, Adobe agreed to settle for US$150 million, half as a civil penalty and half as free services for affected customers, and to make its fees clearer and cancelling simpler. Adobe denied any wrongdoing, saying that while it disagreed with the government's claims, it was "pleased to resolve this matter."

That same month, Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's chief executive for more than 18 years, announced he would step down once a successor was found, and the share price fell close to 7% in after-hours trading. By June, Adobe's shares were down 37% for the year, caught up in what investors have nicknamed the "SaaSpocalypse": a broad sell-off of subscription software companies, driven by fears that AI will eat into what they sell. In September, Adobe named Anil Chakravarthy, who currently runs its customer experience business, as its next chief executive from 1 December.

And yet the business itself is still growing. Adobe's latest results showed record quarterly revenue of US$6.76 billion, up 13% on a year earlier, and it raised its targets for the year. It has also thrown itself into AI. Photoshop and Premiere now have an AI assistant in public beta that can carry out multi-step edits from a plain-English request, and in April Adobe launched a connector that lets Claude work across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, Lightroom and other Creative Cloud apps. There is a certain irony in the same family of AI models now being used to build free replacements for those very apps.

So is the subscription model finished?

Probably not. But it is going to have to work a lot harder.

The best argument for a subscription has always been that you are paying for something ongoing: updates, bug fixes, support for new cameras and file formats, and compatibility with the next version of Windows or macOS. That argument gets weaker when a passable free alternative is a download away and the features you actually use are a small slice of what you are paying for. For hobbyists and occasional users, the people paying the equivalent of US$70 a month to crop photos and make the odd flyer, the pull towards something cheaper is only going to grow.

What is much harder to copy is everything around the app. Cloud storage and syncing between devices, team collaboration, licensed stock libraries, legal protection for commercial work and, above all, AI features that run on the company's own servers all cost real money to provide every month. Expect the big software companies to lean on exactly those things, because they justify a monthly fee in a way the app itself increasingly does not. Tellingly, ArtCraft pays its own bills the same way: the apps are free, but its AI image and video generation is sold on monthly credit plans. The subscription is not so much disappearing as moving to wherever the ongoing costs really are.

Competition should also be good news for customers. When people can realistically walk away, companies tend to offer cheaper plans, simpler cancellation and fewer surprises in the fine print. Regulators have already pushed Adobe in that direction, and a credible free alternative may end up pushing harder than any court settlement.

The catches nobody should ignore

Building version one is the easy part. Keeping software working for ten years, fixing security holes, supporting new file formats and operating systems, and helping the person whose project will not open the night before a deadline is the expensive part, and it is exactly what subscriptions are supposed to pay for. Open-source projects have long struggled here, often relying on a handful of unpaid volunteers. If AI makes it easy to launch dozens of ambitious clones, it may also leave behind a lot of abandoned ones. Code written at speed with AI also has not had decades of real-world use to iron out its weak spots.

Then there is the law. Copying how a program behaves is generally treated differently from copying its code, and the clean-room approach has a long legal history behind it. But closely copying an interface's look and feel can attract other claims, and Adobe holds a large number of software patents. As AppleInsider pointed out, a company with Adobe's resources does not even need to win a lawsuit to make life very difficult for a small project. Here in New Zealand, the Copyright Act only allows decompiling a program in narrow circumstances, mainly so a new, independent program can work alongside it, and not to produce something that closely copies the original. Expect the next few years to bring court cases that redraw these lines.

Security cuts both ways too. Tools like REA make it easier for researchers to find and report flaws in closed software, but they make the same job easier for criminals, and software companies can no longer rely on their code simply being too hard to understand. Closer to home, fake "free Photoshop" downloads have been a favourite way to spread malware for years, and a story like this one hands scammers fresh bait.

A new era for open source

Even with all those caveats, it is hard to see this going back in the box. The techniques are public, the tools are free, and AI coding assistants keep getting better. The most likely outcome is not that Adobe disappears, but that the gap between paid software and its open-source alternatives keeps narrowing, especially for everyday tasks. For years, the honest advice has been that free alternatives exist but you will notice the difference. Within a few years, for a lot of people, that may no longer be true.

There is a quieter possibility as well. As software gets cheaper to write, small businesses may find it practical to have simple tools built around exactly how they work, rather than paying every month for a sprawling package where they use a fraction of the features.

What this means for you right now

Where to go from here

Whether ArtCraft itself goes the distance or not, the idea behind it is out in the world now, and paid software will have to keep earning its place on your bank statement. If you are not sure which of your software subscriptions you actually need, or you would like a hand setting up a free alternative safely, that is exactly the kind of thing we help with. Our look at whether cloud backups are worth paying for covers another common monthly bill, our online safety tips will help you steer clear of dodgy downloads, and if a "free" download has already left your computer misbehaving, see computer repairs.