AI Can Copy Your Product, Not Your Brand

A developer just used AI to rebuild free versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and five other Adobe apps in a matter of days, which raises a fair question for anyone who has spent years building a product. Copying what a product does has never been easier, but copying the reasons people choose it is a different job, and that part is your brand. Here’s what this case shows and what it means for a small business.

Seven Adobe apps, rebuilt in days

In early October, developer Brandon Thomas released seven free, open-source apps that imitate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro, built with an AI coding model from what Adobe’s apps do rather than from their code, and he says he started the project after paying Adobe’s cancellation fee one too many times (Adobe denies any wrongdoing).

As of October 10, 2026, the projects have collected more than 42,000 stars on GitHub, most of them within the first week, but they’re still early test versions, with reports putting them at roughly a quarter to a third of what the originals can do and users pointing to crashes on large Photoshop files and slow performance.

Why I still trust Adobe with my work

I keep using Photoshop and Illustrator because I trust Adobe as a brand, which means I know my work will run smoothly, I know the files I hand to clients and printers will be clean, and I know they keep studying what people like me need, so the tools I’ll want next usually show up there first.

That trust took years to build, through updates that actually made my work easier and through being the programs the whole industry already relies on.

Features can be copied in days, a track record can’t.

Trust is part of what you’re paying for

Any creative app needs your payment details and access to the folders where you keep client work, and with Adobe there’s a long-standing company behind that access, with a reputation to lose and a support team to call when something breaks.

The clone’s code is public and its developer is an experienced engineer with a real company, but most designers can’t read code, and a project that went public a couple of weeks ago simply hasn’t had time to earn the same trust.

The same goes for your own reputation, because if a file won’t open the night before a deadline, the client doesn’t see a bug in a free app, they see a missed deadline from the person they hired, which is why professionals who happily use free tools still choose proven ones for client work.

Price stops mattering the moment a client file is at stake.

Where the clone has a point

Tens of thousands of people cheered for a free alternative, and a lot of that energy seemed to come from frustration with subscriptions and cancellation fees, which shows that a brand can be strong on quality while its policies slowly push people toward the door.

A strong brand earns you patience, not a free pass.

The developer understands the value of a brand too, because he gave all the code away but kept the ArtCraft name and logos as his team’s trademarks, outside the free license.

How a small product becomes the one people ask for by name

If you’re building something small, someone can now recreate what it does faster than ever, so your protection has to come from what a copy can’t reproduce, which is why many Mac users who want to clear out unnecessary files search for CleanMyMac by name, even though free tools do a similar job.

I saw the same thing with Lux Flowers, where interviews showed that their buyers didn’t really buy flowers, they bought the certainty that the gift would make someone smile, and while any florist can copy a bouquet, nobody can copy a brand built around that certainty overnight.

That kind of brand comes from a few things done consistently:

Start from a real customer need, found through research and conversations rather than guesses.
Build a strategy around it, so you know who you serve and what you promise them.
Share how you work, from why you created the product to how you make decisions, so people know the story and not just the features.
Stay consistent for years, because that’s what makes people remember you and come back first.

AI has made it easy to copy what a product does, but not the years of trust and consistency that make people choose one product over another, and that’s the work a brand does.

If you’re building a product and want a brand that people will choose by name, let’s talk, I’d love to hear about your business.