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Probably not, there's relatively little secret sauce to something like Photoshop. It's just a lot of grungy work that, I guess, you can now delegate to an agent if you have enough money and time.

As an aside, I've heard a lot of hot takes about how this is the end of Adobe, but I'm pretty sure it misses the point. The main reason people pay Adobe is because it's a familiar line of stable, well-supported, interoperable, and actively-developed products. There's already plenty of cheaper or free alternatives (Davinci Resolve for video, Capture One / Darktable for raw, Affinity for photo editing and vector drawing, etc), and if Adobe survived that, I sincerely doubt they're going to lose pro customers to a vibecoded app where half the stuff is probably subtly broken or left as a TODO, and that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

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> that will be abandoned in a week, because the whole point was to get that 1M YouTube views.

Longbets 1 week, haha.

We're working our asses off on this.

Most of the team are artists who use these tools actively and we want the replacements for ourselves. I'm a filmmaker, so you can imagine my frustration of being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee".

You're doing God's work. Keep it up! PhotoCraft is really cool, and the pace of stabilizing progress is incredible! Don't listen to people who dismiss your work without getting their hands on it.

No ethical qualms here but you guys should save your money and just use Gimp! It's already free, really capable, and comes from a good and pure place of making software for its own sake. That's the kind of thing that gets you users for decade, beyond any egui rust doo dads.

They are covering the entire Adobe suite, not just Photoshop.

I am definitely interested in alternatives, but I am not interested in an alternative that isn't supported and maintained. Though I suppose at some point I can ask my own agents to support/maintain it?

> being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee"

I’m curious how much is your LLM bill. I’m assuming the idea is that LLMs will maintain the software? I’d be surprised, given the token economy, that you’d have to pay less than those subscriptions to LLM providers.

great question

The very notion that there is an "unsubscribe fee" multiplies the cost 1,000,000x. And not just for me - for everyone.

Please make this make sense with some napkin math. At the end of the day, you can’t do business based on feelings when you have to pay hard earned cash.

I know a few creatives that would be fine with the insane adobe fees if they felt that the fee actually paid for anything to get better. Instead it’s just a new version and rate hike every year but the same paper cut bugs and broken UI still ship.

Crashes don’t get less frequent… etc.

These guys have a shot now.

Doesn’t answer my question, does it?

> Doesn’t answer my question, does it?

You can't compare _cost_ here; apples vs oranges. How much _value_ per unit money is what matters here.

Comparisons should be done against the status quo: ~$60/user/month to adobe for years at a time only to see the product get more bloated, less stable and any bugs/feature-requests you file go to /dev/null.

Value and cost are quantifiable in business, down to the time you put on something. Otherwise it’s just feelings and good vibes. No matter how you calculate the vibe coded model is more expensive for the user without charity.

The vibe coded one will be garbage if you don’t put careful consideration and effort into both developing and maintaining it. That’s all _cost_ that come on top of the exorbitant token price you’ve to pay in perpetuity.

Btw, this is not a defense of Adobe’s software. It’s just that what you’re promoting is even worse than theirs.

Have you guys done any talks or written any articles on how you are developing this software?

Scaling up to this kind of complexity even with AI is still a challenge, at least for me.

> I'm a filmmaker, so you can imagine my frustration of being bitten by the "unsubscribe fee"

What's the 'unsubscribe fee'? Are you referring to choosing something like an annual plan instead of 'Monthly' and only getting 50% back if you cancel partway through?

As you said you're a filmmaker, if someone chooses to obtain the rights to your film for a longer period instead of a shorter period and then changes their mind halfway through, do you similarly give them 50% back?

From what I can see, Adobe prominently and clearly displays from the first public checkout page the differences between 'monthly' and 'annual' options?

> From what I can see, Adobe prominently and clearly displays from the first public checkout page the differences between 'monthly' and 'annual' options?

It does now, because the FTC sued in 2024 and Adobe then corrected this, while settling in March 2026

Not really. Someone using Adobe Suite of products cannot easily switch to Davinci Resolve or Dark Table.

These are NOT the same thing whereas this one particular suite of clone products is exactly menu by menu, keyboard shortcut by keyboard shortcut and feature by feature a pure clone of corresponding products to that extent that they even have a separate dashboard just to track feature parity: https://github.com/storytold/craft-repo-status-app

It is NOT there yet of course but it won't be there in a year? That's an absurd claim to make. I have checked the repos multiple times and every new release keeps fixing something that wasn't working before.

At some point Adobe will go after the clones, copyright their interfaces, close standards, patent stuff etc. The barrier for software used to be implementation effort, but now that it's out of the window, it will be more like other forms of IP (music, physical products, etc).

Do the have legal grounds? Much of their own algorithms would come from open academic papers I suppose?

You can't copyright a user interface any more than you can copyright recipes, perfume, or fashion.

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