In February 2026, investors wiped approximately $830 billion from the market value of software and services companies over six trading sessions, frightened by the possibility that AI could erode businesses built around selling access to software. By October, US software stocks had recovered much of that ground, and Wall Street appeared considerably less alarmed. [1][2]
Outside the financial markets, however, customers had begun doing something that stock prices could scarcely capture. They were making their own software.
Some wanted to replace expensive subscriptions. Others were tired of squeezing their work into applications designed around somebody else’s habits.
With AI coding tools and existing open-source components, they could begin assembling applications around what they needed, however peculiar the requirements. An application serving five colleagues might be quite sufficient.
It didn’t need a market.
That is the change beneath the argument about The Death of SaaS: people are gaining the ability to decide how their software should work, rather than accepting those decisions as part of the price of admission.
In October, an ambitious attempt to recreate Adobe’s professional applications brought that change in expectations into public view.
1. Adobe and the Cost of Learning Someone Else’s Software
The developer behind ArtCraft began publishing seven open-source applications in Rust, with substantial AI assistance. Their targets were familiar: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign. The repositories were public, and other developers could inspect the code and contribute.
Under the Reddit announcement, somebody asked for another program.
“Now do AutoCAD.”
The developer responded with a link to CADCraft, an additional project already underway. [3]
It’s easy to understand the excitement. Adobe’s software has become part of the working environment of designers and photographers, much as Autodesk’s products have shaped established CAD workflows.
People spend years learning these systems. Training courses teach their interfaces, clients request particular file formats, and businesses accumulate work that becomes difficult to move elsewhere.
The subscription is often the most visible expense. The time already invested in learning the software is harder to calculate.
ArtCraft’s early applications, however, were a long way from matching the products they imitated. In an October 10 review, Steve Paris found that PhotoCraft couldn’t open his HEIC photographs and saved edited work only as JPG. FilmCraft struggled with basic trimming and produced unusable audio. [4]
These are understandable limitations for an early experimental project attempting software that large engineering teams have spent decades refining.
A hobbyist can afford to experiment with an unfinished editor; a professional has a client waiting for tomorrow’s revisions. Try explaining that the editable layers are gone, but hey, the toolbar looks just like Photoshop.
The distinction matters in practical work, where an application has to preserve what people create. A designer leaving Adobe may still need to exchange files with clients who haven’t left.
In a July 2025 Reddit discussion, a designer described moving their small company away from Adobe after nearly twenty years of professional use. The responses showed how much previous work and established production habits could complicate a transition, even when people were unhappy with the subscription. [5]
ArtCraft won’t make those dependencies disappear overnight. The developer’s description of the project as a clean-room recreation also remains a claim about the development approach rather than an independently established legal finding.
But there is something peculiar about the assumption that an alternative must reproduce the original product in its entirety.
A photographer may need a reliable RAW-processing workflow without the surrounding application ecosystem. A small business might require a handful of image operations performed consistently. Someone producing illustrations may care deeply about brush behavior while having no use for dozens of other features.
An application developed for a vast customer base necessarily contains decisions made for people whose work bears little resemblance to yours.
A faithful clone would inherit many of those choices, including the ones that were inconvenient in the first place.
We have spent so many years adjusting ourselves to the shape of software that changing the tool itself sounds almost unreasonable, although people who work with physical tools would recognize the impulse immediately.
2. The Hammer and the Way We Work
A carpenter can replace a worn hammer handle or choose a different weight for a particular job. Years of practice still matter, and the tool’s design has a considerable influence on the work. But modifying equipment to suit a particular task has always been part of the craft.
Computer applications trained us into another relationship.
We learned their terminology and remembered where their designers had placed the controls. A business might change its procedures because the software handled one sequence more conveniently than another.
Employees became proficient at navigating features they seldom needed while finding elaborate workarounds for the few that were missing.
Once everybody knew the procedure, the inconvenience became routine. Nobody wanted to disturb a system that had taken so long to learn.
In July 2026, a construction-business operator described this frustration in a Reddit discussion. They had tried Buildertrend, a commercial construction-management platform, and found it bloated and cumbersome for the way their company operated. Rather than return to a costly subscription, they had spent about a month intermittently developing their own management software.
The application was still taking shape. What they wanted from it was unmistakable:
“It works how our business runs instead of us trying to adapt to the way they think we should do things.” [6]
The parent Reddit post was removed, although the relevant comment remains visible.
That is the experience I find more revealing than an ambitious claim about replacing an entire software company. The construction operator already knew how their business ran. Their problem was finding software that respected those practices.
Other contributors in the discussion described similarly narrow approaches to construction administration, including scheduling through SMS so subcontractors could confirm appointments without adopting another application.
Consider what disappears from the usual software-selection process. The business no longer needs to evaluate hundreds of capabilities it never requested. It can start from the tasks employees actually perform and add functions as those tasks require them.
The resulting program could be unsuitable for almost every other construction company. Its owner has little reason to care.
The ambition here is surprisingly modest: to have the right tool for the work already being done.
And a great deal of the technical foundation for such tools has been available for years.
3. We Already Had the Building Materials
Open-source software had been expanding access to advanced technical capabilities long before the present AI boom. People often discuss these projects as inexpensive substitutes for commercial applications, overlooking the substantial engineering they contain and the professional work already produced with them.
The alternatives cover familiar software categories:
- Microsoft 365 → LibreOffice / ONLYOFFICE. Document editing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
- Autodesk Maya → Blender. 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visual production.
- AutoCAD / Fusion → FreeCAD. Parametric CAD and mechanical design.
- Commercial antivirus suites → Windows Security / Bitdefender Free Free baseline malware protection.
- TechSmith Snagit → ShareX/ OBS Studio. Screen capture, desktop recording, and workflow automation.
- Wondershare UniConverter → HandBrake/ FFmpeg. Video conversion, compression, and media processing.
- Adobe Premiere Pro / After Effects → DaVinci Resolve / Kdenlive Video editing and production tools.
- Adobe Lightroom → darktable/ RawTherapee. RAW photography and image development.
- Adobe Photoshop → GIMP/ Krita/ PhotoCraft Image editing and digital painting; PhotoCraft remains experimental.
- Adobe Illustrator → Inkscape/ VectorCraft. Vector illustration and scalable graphics; VectorCraft remains experimental.
Some products in this list are free proprietary software rather than open source, and the applications vary in scope. They are alternatives for particular kinds of work, with different features and degrees of compatibility.
But consider Blender
The animated feature Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, was produced using Blender and EEVEE.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2025. Zilbalodis, who had previously worked with Maya, described adopting Blender because its rendering workflow gave him the control and speed he wanted for his production. [7]
This is hardly an example of professionals settling for inadequate software because they couldn’t afford the real thing. The director chose a tool that suited the way he wanted to make a film.
FFmpeg provides a different illustration. Its media-processing capabilities can sit underneath a small application that handles a production team’s particular conversion requirements. The person constructing that application doesn’t need to develop a video codec. Much of the difficult engineering already exists.
AI coding assistants can help people create the surrounding application: a small interface, a sequence of processing steps, perhaps an integration with another tool used in the same workflow.
Open-source projects such as Screenshot-to-Code push the starting point even closer to the user by generating interface code from visual examples. A screenshot is only part of an application, but it can give someone an initial structure to modify. [8]
There is a long history behind this kind of customization. People built intricate applications in Excel, and platforms such as Airtable enabled teams to organize databases around their own activities well before AI coding assistants arrived.
What is expanding now is the range of changes people can attempt through natural-language interaction with code. They can start with components created by skilled developers and shape their own application around those foundations.
The benefit becomes especially clear when the intended audience is very small.
4. Software for One
In June 2026, a Reddit user asked which paid applications people had replaced by building their own with AI.
The replies brought that possibility down to the scale of everyday work. People had grown tired of accommodating software that never quite fitted their needs, and some had begun changing the tools themselves.
One reply described taking a screenshot of a Monday.com board and asking Bolt to build something similar. Within hours, the user reported having a working application they named Tuesday.
They subsequently tailored it to their team’s habits, including synchronization with a shared Google Calendar, and claimed savings of approximately $800 per month in Monday.com licenses. Those figures come from the user’s account rather than an independent audit. [9]
The name Tuesday has a kind of accidental charm. The user wasn’t trying to launch a rival to Monday.com. Their team needed a particular way to manage work, and the person building the application could decide which functions deserved attention.
Elsewhere in the same discussion, a user described making a budgeting application that relied on manually entered transactions. Another participant explained why manual entry could be desirable: recording expenses deliberately was part of how they kept track of their spending. An automatic bank import, usually treated as an obvious improvement, would remove part of the experience they valued. [9]
This is the sort of disagreement commercial software designers must routinely reconcile. A feature can make the application better for one customer while making it less suitable for another.
Software developed for a single person can accept peculiar requirements without taking a vote.
A further Reddit contributor described creating their own document-management system after a product they had used for fifteen years was discontinued following an acquisition. The purchaser was attempting to move customers onto a more expensive subscription service.
The user reported building an alternative that could work with a collection approaching 100,000 documents, despite having little recent programming experience. This remains a self-reported account, but the motive is hard to miss: they wanted to retain control over work that another company’s acquisition had disrupted. [9]
Similar cases have appeared outside developer communities. In January, TechCrunch reported on people making micro-apps for themselves and small groups.
Rebecca Yu created Where2Eat to help her friends choose restaurants. Other applications were built for household tasks and temporary needs that would never have justified a conventional commercial product. [10]
A conventional software company must consider market size. The owner of a personal application can ask whether the software serves the people who will actually use it.
That difference changes what counts as a successful product.
If a useful tool lasts six months and is then replaced because its owner’s requirements have changed, it may have fulfilled its purpose. If it contains only four features, those four can receive attention that a large general-purpose application would have distributed across far more capabilities.
More importantly, the user can participate in deciding how those features work.
Research into generative and malleable interfaces has begun exploring this relationship more formally. Yining Cao, Peiling Jiang, and Haijun Xia examined interfaces organized around task-driven data models, allowing users to modify generated applications through natural language and direct interaction. Their CHI 2025 work explores how applications can evolve alongside the requirements of the people using them. [11]
An application can therefore become something less fixed than the product delivered at the moment of purchase. Its structure can reflect the work as the work changes.
This experience can seem unfamiliar because professional software has been distributed through standardized applications for so long.
Historically, however, the movement of technical knowledge toward a wider population is hardly unprecedented.
5. Gutenberg, the Encyclopédie, and the Open Web
Around the middle of the fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg helped transform book production in Europe.
Printing with movable metal type was already known in Korea, as demonstrated by the surviving Jikji of 1377, but Gutenberg’s European printing system made the repeated production of books more efficient within its own historical environment.
The Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1454–1455, remains one of the defining artifacts of that change. [12][13]
Books still required literacy, and access was far from universal. Yet the economics of making and circulating written material had changed. Knowledge that depended heavily on laborious manuscript copying could now travel through a growing printing industry.
Three centuries later, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert undertook another revealing project.
Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie attempted to gather knowledge across the sciences and the mechanical arts. Its enormous collection of illustrations documented machinery and working processes in remarkable detail.
The University of Chicago’s ARTFL project records seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates in the original publication. [14]
The decision to document practical trades was particularly significant.
At the time, much technical knowledge belonged to the working traditions of individual craftspeople and workshops. Some manufacturing practices were guarded closely. Diderot wanted to put these processes into words and pictures so that people outside the original workshops could study them.
John R. Pannabecker’s historical research describes how the Encyclopédie helped shift the mechanical arts from knowledge embedded largely in working communities toward knowledge represented systematically in published materials. [15]
An engraving couldn’t make its reader a master craftsperson. There are forms of judgment that cannot be transferred completely through a diagram. But someone who had never entered a particular workshop could begin to understand machinery and production methods previously difficult to examine.
That is a striking antecedent to the open-source idea: useful technical knowledge becomes available for study beyond the people and institutions that originally developed it.
Then came the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web at CERN beginning in 1989 to help researchers exchange information. On April 30, 1993, CERN released core Web software into the public domain. That decision made the basic technology available for others to use and improve without paying CERN for permission. [16]
The Web grew on the foundation of an internet that already existed, and its expansion depended on browsers and technical contributions from many organizations. CERN’s own history emphasizes how openly available software and accessible browsers helped the Web spread beyond its original scientific setting.
One detail is particularly relevant today: Berners-Lee’s original WorldWideWeb browser was also an editor. The early vision included the ability to create and change pages, even though most people eventually came to know the Web primarily as something they browsed. [16]
For ordinary users, the arrival of accessible publishing tools changed who could put information online. A person no longer needed to own a newspaper or a broadcasting network to publish something others could read.
There is a thread running through these episodes, though each belongs to a different technological world.
Printing altered the reproduction of written material. The Encyclopédie tried to bring practical technical knowledge beyond the workshops where it had accumulated. The open Web expanded opportunities to publish and exchange information across institutional boundaries.
The consequences extended well beyond the industries that created the original technologies.
AI-assisted software development is opening another part of that history. A person who understands a particular job can increasingly participate in making the software used to perform it.
The technical foundations are often already available through open-source projects. AI helps bridge some of the distance between understanding a problem and constructing a working tool.
The possibilities remain uneven. Some applications are easy to modify, while others embody extraordinary engineering complexity. A sophisticated CAD system cannot be conjured into professional reliability merely by reproducing its interface.
Yet people are gaining practical ways to influence software’s design without first becoming specialists in every underlying technology.
That changes the relationship between a person and the tools they depend on.
Final Thoughts — The Choice We Didn’t Have
The traditional software business was built around producing applications that large numbers of people could use. Standardization brought real benefits, but it also required customers to accept decisions made for a much wider population.
If a function was missing, users searched for another product or waited. If a workflow didn’t fit, they learned a workaround. Years of practice made those compromises familiar, while subscriptions kept access to the software tied to decisions made elsewhere.
Now people are beginning to make different choices. A construction operator is developing software around the way his company already works. A small team has built Tuesday because Monday.com carried more than it needed. Someone with years of documents has attempted to replace a system whose owner wanted to move them onto another subscription.
Meanwhile, open-source projects continue to make advanced technology available for reuse, and AI coding tools give more people a way to assemble that technology around their own requirements.
Services that genuinely help people will continue to find customers. A user can choose to pay for infrastructure or collaboration without surrendering every decision about the application that sits above them.
The part of SaaS losing its hold is the assumption that useful software must arrive as a standardized package whose structure the customer has little power to change.
That brings me back to the ArtCraft announcement.
“Now do AutoCAD.”
The request was for another familiar professional application. After reading the accounts of people making software for their own work, though, I wonder what that person actually needed AutoCAD to do.
Perhaps the answer wouldn’t require another enormous application. Perhaps it would require something smaller, built around the particular design problem sitting on their desk.
For a long time, that distinction hardly mattered. Most users had to choose among the applications somebody else was willing to build.
They are beginning to have a say in the tools themselves.
References
[1] Reuters, “Selloff wipes out nearly $1 trillion from software and services stocks as investors debate AI’s existential threat,” Reuters, February 4, 2026.
[2] Reuters, “US software stocks scale fresh 2026 highs as AI disruption worries fade,” Reuters, October 6, 2026.
[3] ArtCraft developer, “I’ve created Open Source 100% Rust clean-room replacements for 7 of Adobe’s apps,” Reddit, r/SaaS, October 2026.
[4] Steve Paris, “One dev is recreating 7 Adobe apps in Rust for free — so I tested it out,” TechRadar, October 10, 2026.
[5] r/graphic_design contributor, “Why I’m (we’re) leaving Adobe,” Reddit, r/graphic_design, July 2025.
[6] r/ClaudeAI commenter, “Construction-management discussion, including Buildertrend replacement,” Reddit, r/ClaudeAI, July 12, 2026. Parent post removed; relevant comment remains accessible.
[7] Francesco Siddi, “Making Flow — Interview with director Gints Zilbalodis,” Blender, January 22, 2025; updated to reflect subsequent awards.
[8] Abi Raja and contributors, “screenshot-to-code,” GitHub repository, accessed October 2026.
[9] r/ClaudeAI contributors, “What paid apps have you ditched by vibe coding a replacement?,” Reddit, r/ClaudeAI, June 2026 and subsequent comments.
[10] Dominic-Madori Davis, “The rise of ‘micro’ apps: non-developers are writing apps instead of buying them,” TechCrunch, January 16, 2026.
[11] Yining Cao, Peiling Jiang, and Haijun Xia, “Generative and Malleable User Interfaces with Generative and Evolving Task-Driven Data Model,” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article 686, 2025.
[12] UNESCO, “Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol (vol. II),” Memory of the World Register, 2001.
[13] Library of Congress, “The Gutenberg Bible at the Library of Congress: Introduction,” Library of Congress Research Guide, undated.
[14] University of Chicago, “The ARTFL Encyclopédie,” ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, institutional digital edition.
[15] John R. Pannabecker, “Diderot, the Mechanical Arts, and the Encyclopédie: In Search of the Heritage of Technology Education,” Journal of Technology Education, 6(1), Fall 1994.
[16] CERN, “A Short History of the Web,” CERN institutional history, undated.