What happens when anyone can build the software?

A new wave of AI-assisted software projects raises an interesting question: if the software itself becomes easier to reproduce, what are we really paying established software companies for?

There’s an interesting project attracting attention at the moment called ArtCraft. Its creator has been using AI-assisted development to produce free, open-source alternatives to some very familiar commercial applications.

It started with software resembling Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. Now the project has expanded to include alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Predictably, the reaction has been mixed.

Some people are enthusiastic about the idea of free alternatives to expensive subscription software, particularly from companies they feel have treated customers poorly. Others have been quick to dismiss the project as “AI slop”, questioning whether software developed so quickly with AI can possibly be reliable, secure or maintainable.

There are legitimate questions about the quality and long-term viability of these applications. But I think focusing too heavily on whether ArtCraft is any good risks missing something more interesting.

What happens when creating software that competes with established products becomes dramatically easier?

ArtCraft might succeed, it might fail, or it might remain an interesting experiment. But perhaps its significance isn’t whether it becomes a serious alternative to Adobe or Microsoft. Perhaps it’s another indication of a shift in the software industry, and particularly in the relationship between software companies and their customers.

Building software is becoming easier. Delivering good software is still hard.

Open-source alternatives to commercial software aren’t new. Projects such as LibreOffice, GIMP and Blender have existed for years, with varying degrees of success in challenging established commercial products.

But building and maintaining sophisticated software requires enormous effort, and that’s traditionally been a substantial barrier to competition.

AI-assisted development is potentially changing that.

A developer can now produce functioning software in a fraction of the time that might previously have been required. That doesn’t mean the results will necessarily be good, but it could make competition much less expensive to initiate.

Previously, someone frustrated with Adobe might have wanted to create an alternative but faced years of development work before having anything usable. AI may make that first step significantly easier.

Of course, there’s an enormous difference between getting an application working and producing software that people can depend on.

Testing, security, architecture, compatibility, ongoing improvements and maintenance don’t disappear simply because AI helped write the code. In some cases, developing software so quickly may create additional problems in those areas.

Those are reasonable criticisms of ArtCraft, and any other AI-assisted project.

But I’d distinguish those concerns from dismissing software simply because AI was involved in its creation.

AI is a tool. Software developed with AI assistance can be excellent or terrible, just as software written entirely by humans can be excellent or terrible. What matters is the quality of the result, the rigour of the development process, and whether someone is prepared to maintain it.

ArtCraft has a considerable distance to travel before its applications could be considered dependable replacements for established professional tools. But that’s not necessarily the point.

If AI is lowering the cost of creating competing software, the implications extend well beyond any one project.

What are we actually paying for?

Think about Microsoft Word.

For many people, Word is still fundamentally a word processor. You type some text, format it, perhaps insert a table or image, and save a document.

Those basic capabilities are hardly unusual today. Text editing has become a widely available, largely commoditized capability.

Yet the Word we use today is a very different proposition from say, Word 2003.

Back then, you generally bought a copy of Office and could continue using it for as long as it remained compatible with your computer. When Microsoft released a new version, you could decide whether the additional features justified buying it.

If the improvements weren’t particularly useful to you, you could simply stick with what you already had.

That gave customers an important way of expressing what they valued: they could choose not to upgrade.

Today, Microsoft’s main offering is Microsoft 365, sold as an ongoing subscription. Traditional one-time-purchase versions of Office still exist, but much of the company’s development and commercial focus is on the subscription offering.

There are real benefits to this approach. Customers receive continuous improvements, security updates and new capabilities without having to purchase and install major new versions. The service also includes things that simply weren’t part of the traditional desktop Office package.

But the relationship has changed.

Customers no longer get the same opportunity to decide whether each new generation of features is worth paying for. They’re subscribing to an evolving package, whether or not they value every addition.

The economic signal has shifted from “Are these new features worth buying?” to “Is this entire service still worth paying for?”

That’s a much bigger decision, particularly when an organization has built its working practices around that service.

And it brings us to an important distinction:

Reproducing the functionality of an application isn’t the same as reproducing the value of the service surrounding it.

ArtCraft might eventually produce an excellent word processor. But that doesn’t automatically make it a replacement for Microsoft 365.

Consider two organizations.

One is a small business that occasionally creates documents, prepares invoices and uses basic spreadsheets. It might need surprisingly little of Microsoft 365’s wider functionality.

Another relies on shared documents, real-time collaboration, SharePoint, Teams, integrated identity management and carefully controlled access to information.

For the first organization, a simpler and less expensive alternative might be perfectly adequate.

For the second, reproducing Word’s editing capabilities would barely scratch the surface of what needs replacing.

Neither organization is wrong.

The question isn’t whether ArtCraft, LibreOffice or another alternative can replace Microsoft 365 for everyone.

It’s whether an alternative can support the particular workflows that matter to an individual organization.

Commoditized functionality

There’s a parallel with email.

Few organizations choose between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace because one has a fundamentally better mailbox. Sending, receiving and storing email are established capabilities that customers simply expect to work.

The decision is increasingly about everything surrounding that mailbox: collaboration, integration, security, administration, reliability and the wider service.

Perhaps we’re seeing more software capabilities move in that direction. As individual functions become easier to reproduce, the differentiation may increasingly lie in how they’re delivered, integrated and supported.

The benefits of staying versus the costs of leaving

That brings us to something I think is particularly important.

Established software companies have a substantial competitive advantage in their ecosystems.

Microsoft 365 isn’t valuable simply because Word, Excel and PowerPoint are good applications. It’s valuable because those applications work together, because they’re integrated with other services, and because so many other organizations use them. And that has genuine value for customers.

But the same ecosystem can also make leaving difficult.

An organization might be perfectly happy with Microsoft 365’s functionality, while becoming increasingly frustrated with its licensing, pricing or commercial direction.

Yet moving away could mean changing workflows, migrating documents, retraining staff, rebuilding integrations and potentially creating compatibility problems when working with customers and suppliers.

The organization may remain a customer not because Microsoft is necessarily offering the best value, but because switching would be too disruptive.

This creates an important distinction between the benefits of staying and the costs of leaving.

• The benefits of staying are what customers receive from a good product and service.
• The costs of leaving are the difficulties, expenses and disruption associated with choosing something else.

Both can contribute to customer retention, but they’re not the same thing. And there’s a risk that established suppliers become too dependent on the latter.

Adobe provides an interesting example. Its subscription and cancellation practices have attracted considerable criticism, culminating in a proposed $150 million US government settlement in March 2026. Adobe disputed the allegations, but the controversy illustrates the frustration customers can experience when they feel they have limited control over a commercial relationship.

This isn’t an argument against subscriptions. Ongoing development, updates, support and services all cost money, and subscriptions can be a perfectly sensible way to pay for them.

But customers need to feel that they’re receiving genuine value, rather than being trapped in an arrangement that’s difficult or expensive to escape.

And this is where the emergence of alternatives becomes particularly interesting.

Competition doesn’t require the incumbent to disappear

ArtCraft isn’t the only development worth watching.

In October 2025, Canva relaunched Affinity as a free professional design application, combining its photo-editing, vector-design and page-layout capabilities into a single product. Some AI capabilities remain part of Canva’s paid offering, but the core creative tools are available without a software subscription.

Unlike ArtCraft, Affinity is built on years of development as an established commercial product.

These are two very different approaches, but both potentially challenge the value proposition of Adobe’s offerings.

And neither needs to make Photoshop disappear to have an impact.

If a growing number of occasional users, freelancers and smaller organizations decide that alternatives meet their needs, Adobe may face increasing pressure to demonstrate why its products and services justify their price.

Professional customers might continue choosing Adobe because its software, integrations and workflows are genuinely better suited to their requirements.

That’s fine. Indeed, that’s how competition should work.

The interesting shift is that customers may have more meaningful choices. And that can influence the behaviour of an incumbent long before a challenger becomes a market leader.

Haven’t we seen something like this before?

There’s an interesting parallel with the music industry when MP3 downloads and file-sharing services began challenging its established business model.

Much of the industry’s response focused on piracy and copyright infringement. Those were legitimate concerns. Some unauthorized downloads undoubtedly represented lost sales.

But treating every download as equivalent to a lost full-price purchase overlooked the different reasons people were downloading music.

Some were obtaining music they would otherwise have paid for. Some were downloading things they would never have purchased anyway.

And others were potential paying customers who wanted something the existing business model wasn’t providing.

They wanted convenient access to individual tracks, portable music collections and eventually access across multiple devices without having to manage individual purchases.

The subsequent success of iTunes and streaming services demonstrated that people were perfectly willing to pay for music when the offering met their needs.

The industry’s problem wasn’t simply that people could get music for free. The existing way of selling and distributing music increasingly failed to reflect how customers wanted to consume it.

ArtCraft isn’t Napster. It’s attempting to build independent implementations of software rather than distributing unauthorized copies of existing products. Its claims about clean-room development may themselves face legal scrutiny, but that’s a separate issue.

The relevant parallel is about business models and customer behaviour.

It’s easy for an incumbent to assume that people turning towards free alternatives simply don’t want to pay.

But that’s not necessarily what’s happening.

Some people want lower prices. Others want more flexibility, greater independence, simpler licensing, fewer restrictions or a commercial relationship they feel is fairer.

And many are perfectly willing to pay for a better service.

If software companies misunderstand those motivations, they risk focusing on protecting their existing model rather than improving what they offer customers.

What does this mean for digital sovereignty?

There’s another dimension to all of this: technology sovereignty.

One of the difficulties facing Canadian alternatives to established international technology platforms is that they’re not simply competing against individual products.

They’re competing against entire ecosystems.

A Canadian alternative might provide excellent document editing, for example, but that doesn’t mean an organization can realistically adopt it if its essential workflows depend on Microsoft 365.

That doesn’t make the Canadian alternative worthless. It means we need to look beyond the individual application to understand what an organization actually needs.

And sovereignty doesn’t necessarily mean replacing every foreign technology supplier.

It can mean understanding dependencies, maintaining viable alternatives, ensuring data and workflows remain portable, and retaining the practical ability to make different choices in the future.

There’s a difference between having an alternative available and having the genuine freedom to use it.

As AI potentially makes competing software easier to develop, it could help make some alternatives more viable.

But it doesn’t automatically resolve the surrounding dependencies. An open-source application might still rely on foreign cloud infrastructure, external AI services or a very small group of maintainers.

The important thing is understanding the complete picture.

If alternatives become more credible, organizations may gain greater freedom to choose technologies based on what actually works for them.

And that could create additional pressure on incumbent suppliers to improve interoperability, portability and the overall customer experience.

So, what happens when anyone can build the software?

We’re clearly not at the point where anyone can reproduce a mature application like Photoshop or Word and immediately offer a dependable equivalent.

And perhaps we never will be in quite those terms.

But AI-assisted development appears to be reducing some of the barriers to competition. Existing alternatives are evolving, new commercial models are emerging, and customers have more reasons than ever to question the value they’re getting from established suppliers.

ArtCraft might not be the project that changes anything directly.

But it may be another sign of a broader shift.

For decades, software companies have been able to charge partly because recreating what they’ve built was extraordinarily difficult.

If that changes, even gradually, customers may increasingly ask a different question.

Not simply “What does this software do?”

But “Why should I pay this particular company to provide it?”

There are plenty of good answers. Reliability, compatibility, security, integration, support, ongoing improvement and confidence in the provider all have genuine value.

And those things may become even more important as the underlying software functionality becomes easier to reproduce.

For established companies such as Microsoft and Adobe, that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning their current business models or becoming something fundamentally different.

It means ensuring that the entire offering continues to justify its cost, and that the customer experience is good enough to make people want to stay.

Because there’s a significant difference between customers choosing to remain with a supplier because it delivers the best value, and customers remaining because leaving is simply too difficult.

Perhaps the biggest challenge from projects like ArtCraft isn’t that they’ll make existing software companies obsolete. It’s that they may help restore some of the choice and bargaining power that customers have gradually lost.

And that seems like a development worth watching.