The comparison is not quite equal. Because if I don’t pay for photopea, I can still use it for free with ads. So in effect it’s like a pay-what-you-want pricing model.

Photopea and Vectorpea live in the intersection between Photoshop/Illustrator and apps like Canva, which, let’s just accept it, is the vast majority of users out there.

Pull back for a moment and consider where this is going. If we’re talking three-legged stools, good raster and vector editors held up by the browser means they’ve got a seat at the table. Adobe is literally spending billions trying to achieve the same thing.

This stuff should be baked into the browser at this point, but we’ll eventually get there. With decent raster and vector tools you can build diagrams, whiteboards, pagination, presentation, animation, app mock-ups, even throwaway social media banners—-and it’s all scriptable and multi-player when it’s in a browser. And it’s easier to tack on “AI” when your workflow (another example) is in a browser to begin with.

Don't you also have to subscribe to Photoshop for a year?

With a large 4K monitor, I just tolerate the ads.