You Can No Longer Charge People for Software

There was a time when you paid for software. You bought a CD, you got a serial key, you typed it in with the care of someone defusing a bomb. Later you paid every month instead. Either way, the deal was the same: someone built a thing you couldn't build, so you paid them for it.

i think we're watching that deal die, live, this month.

TL;DR

A solo dev rebuilt seven Adobe apps (Photoshop, Premiere, Lightroom and friends) in Rust with AI, open sourced them, and PhotoCraft alone has over 50,000 GitHub stars in two weeks.
GTA V ran in a browser tab for a few hours last week. Vice City did the same last year.
If anyone can replicate your software, even badly, charging for it stops working long term.
The real money in this gold rush is going to the people selling shovels: Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia.
Is it an AI bubble? Maybe. i don't think it pops, i think it slowly normalizes. AI is staying either way.

Someone just cloned the Adobe suite

So there's this project called ArtCraft. A developer named Brandon Thomas used Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust to build open-source alternatives to seven Adobe apps: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere), LightCraft (Lightroom), PrintCraft (Acrobat), EffectCraft (After Effects) and DesignCraft (InDesign). They run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and you don't need a subscription to use them. (PetaPixel, HotHardware)

The repos went up on September 30. As i write this, storytold/photocraft is sitting at around 53,000 stars. FilmCraft and LightCraft are past 11,000 each. That is two weeks old.

His reason? He got hit by Adobe's "cancellation fee" one too many times. Which, fair. That fee is the same thing the US government sued Adobe over back in 2024, so he's not exactly alone in being annoyed.

Fry from Futurama waving cash, saying shut up and take my money — Us, buying software in 2009

And look, i'm not saying it's perfect. It's alpha. People are reporting glitches, weird tool behaviour and performance issues, and Brandon himself calls it far from production ready. He calls it a "clean-room reimplementation" too, and whether Adobe's lawyers agree is a whole other story.

But that's kind of my point. It's out there, and a bad free Photoshop that gets better every week is a real problem for a good Photoshop that costs you every month.

GTA V. In a browser. Who knew.

Then there's this one, which genuinely broke my brain a little.

On October 6, a site showed up running GTA V in Chrome. No install, no cloud gaming, just a WebAssembly build pulling down around 700 MB of assets. Story mode, free roam, the whole thing. It lasted a few hours before it vanished, and the owner was apparently asking around for who wants the code. (God is a Geek, ProPakistani)

(Nobody has verified exactly how it worked, and there were security warnings about the site, so please don't go hunting for mirrors and download random files. i'm talking about it, not recommending it.)

And this wasn't even the first time. GTA Vice City got ported to the browser by DOS Zone back in December 2025. Take-Two hit it with a DMCA, it went down, and then another one popped up anyway.

i grew up thinking GTA needed a proper PC, and now it needs a tab. Crazy times to be alive, man.

Why you can't charge for software anymore

The thought i keep coming back to is this. If people can reverse engineer anything, and AI makes reverse engineering a weekend project instead of a five year one, then the moment your software gets popular, someone clones it.

Probably a bad one: buggy, half finished, missing your best features. But it's free, it's open source, and it's up on GitHub where anyone can fix it.

So your software ends up open source either way. You either open it yourself, or someone does a worse version of it for you and the community slowly makes it better.

Does charging still make money? Sure, for a while. Adobe isn't going broke next quarter. But long term? i don't think it's a good thing to build a business on. The moat used to be "this is hard to build." That moat is now a puddle.

It's a gold rush. Sell shovels.

There's that old line about the California gold rush: the people who got rich weren't the miners, they were the ones selling shovels to the miners.

Charlie Chaplin digging in the snow in The Gold Rush — Every vibe coder with a SaaS idea right now

That's exactly what's happening right now. Everyone is out there digging, building apps, cloning Photoshop, porting GTA, shipping SaaS. And who gets paid on every single shovel stroke? Anthropic. OpenAI. The people selling the API. And under them, Nvidia, selling the GPUs to the people selling the API.

ArtCraft is free for you. It was not free to build. Every one of those commits went through someone's API bill. The miner might strike gold or might not. The shovel shop gets paid either way.

So if software itself is turning into something you can't really charge for, the money moves to whoever owns the intelligence that makes software. Which is kind of what i said back in my vibe coders post: whoever controls the intelligence controls everything built on top of it.

Okay but is this an AI bubble?

i don't know. Nobody does, and anyone who says they do is selling something (probably a course).

Some economists think it is. Capital Economics told CBS their best guess is it starts bursting in 2027. Others think it slowly deflates instead of popping, because the companies spending the money are huge and actually profitable.

The 'this is fine' dog sitting in a burning room drinking coffee — Investors reading AI capex numbers

i'm in the second camp. i don't think it pops. i think it gets normalized. The hype calms down, the dumb wrapper startups die, and AI just becomes a boring normal part of everything, the way the internet did after the dot-com crash. It's a confusing state to be in right now, but even if it is a bubble, AI is here to stay.

Because look at what the models are doing this month alone:

OpenAI dropped results on more than 300 open math research problems on October 6, from an internal model they haven't even released. Mathematicians are still checking a lot of it, but still. Open problems. Hundreds.
Meta just yesterday launched Muse Wonder, which they say reaches the frontier and matches or beats recent OpenAI and Anthropic models. That still needs independent testing, but Meta is properly in the race now.

Everyone is pushing their own frontier. My guess is it all gets cheaper and more boring from here, which is what happens to every technology that actually sticks around.

So where does that leave us?

Somewhere in the history books there's going to be a line: "people used to pay for software." And the kids reading it will think it's as weird as paying per text message.

i don't fully know what replaces it. Maybe you charge for the service, the hosting, the support, the trust. Maybe you charge for being the one who built it first and keeps it best. What i'm pretty sure about is that charging for the code itself is running out of time.

And the shovel sellers figured that out before the rest of us did.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." — Alan Kay

Note: This essay represents my personal thoughts and speculations. AI assistance was used to refine grammar and spelling, but all opinions, arguments, and perspectives are entirely my own.