Adobe, RapidRAW, and the End of Selling Software as a Product
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Adobe, RapidRAW, and the End of Selling Software as a Product<br>If the interface can be rebuilt in weeks, the real question is what's behind it.
Dan Kinsky<br>Aug 06, 2026
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I love taking photos.<br>Not in any professional capacity — just travel photos, sometimes I’ll take my camera around the city.<br>This one’s from a work trip I took last year:
Dún Laoghaire harbour, Ireland, after sunset.<br>Here’s the thing though — only half the magic happens in the camera. The other half happens in the edit.
Dún Laoghaire harbour, Ireland, after sunset. Unedited.<br>The problem though, is Adobe Lightroom1.<br>Or, I guess, it’s the price.<br>Adobe Lightroom runs on a subscription costing $18/month2. Want Photoshop too? $30/month. Maybe that’s fine if photography’s your job — I suppose I do pay $20/month for Claude.<br>But photography isn’t a job for me. It’s a hobby.<br>And that’s assuming I actually cancel every time. Given the friction of constantly re-subscribing, cancelling, and re-activating, I’m paying $18 whether I open it or not.<br>That $18 is also not always $18. If you’re not paying attention, you get steered into the $12/month “annual paid monthly” plan — cancel a month in and you get hit with a fine worth 50% of your remaining payments. Adobe finalized a $150 million settlement with the DOJ over exactly this practice.3<br>And so, for as long as I can remember, I would search for alternatives.<br>For Lightroom, that meant using Darktable4 or RawTherapee5. Feature-wise, there’s nothing they don’t support. But they drain your soul every time you open them. One Reddit comment put it better than I can:<br>“It’s more intuitive to pilot a spaceship than using RawTherapee or Darktable. RapidRaw beats them easy.”6
Tam Coc, Vietnam — before and after colour correction.<br>A Summer Project
I discovered RapidRAW7 a couple months ago.<br>It has all the bare bones things you’d expect — tonal sliders, curves, white balance, colour mixer, colour grading wheels, sharpening, local masking, photo tagging. It includes things you wouldn’t expect — community presets, AI masking, AI erasing, importing LUTs.<br>AND, and this is big: It’s just fun to use. It’s by far the best UI/UX I’ve used in open-source software in a long time. No searching around a dozen menus to find features, no lag when you touch sliders. You don’t need a 5 hour YouTube tutorial to learn RapidRAW.<br>Those pictures I showed earlier? They were edited in RapidRAW.
Colour grading in RapidRAW.<br>It started as one 18-year-old’s pet project, frustrated with how laggy Lightroom was — built in two weeks, using AI as a research partner to implement image-processing math he’d never studied.8<br>Darktable, considered the gold standard of open-source Lightroom alternatives, sits at 12.9k stars on GitHub after 15+ years of development. RapidRAW? 9.2k in just over a year. Feature-wise it’s not there yet. But people are paying attention.<br>The Playbook
Adobe's been around 44 years. Free alternatives have existed for just as long. Why would this one matter?<br>Adobe started with PostScript. A programming language used to define what to print. For a while, they built things — Illustrator, Premiere, Acrobat, InDesign, one after another through the 90s.<br>They licensed the rights to distribute Photoshop in 1988. Then, in 1995, once it had become the industry standard, they bought the rights to it outright for $34.5 million.<br>That became the standard.<br>Every time something threatened to get in Adobe’s way after that, the fix was the same: buy it.<br>Macromedia (Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks) in 2005. Omniture in 2009. Then Magento, Marketo, Frame.io.<br>In 2023 they tried it with Figma. $20 billion — the biggest swing yet. This time, fearing a near-monopoly, EU and UK regulators said no. Adobe was forced to walk away a billion dollars poorer for trying.<br>Last year, Adobe posted record revenue — $25.2 billion. Record profit too.9<br>The stock's down 23.5% anyway, and Narayen, CEO for eighteen years, stepped down. Wall Street’s worried about AI.<br>I am too.<br>Just not in the same way: they’re worried about AI replacing their tools.<br>I’m worried about AI building their tools.<br>Open-Source Software Can’t Be Bought
And in a world where AI can build a reasonable, free, open-source competitor to your software in a matter of weeks, what exactly are you charging $18 a month for?<br>The formula behind Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign — it’s all known. None of it is a secret. The only reason nobody’s built an open-source competitor is because of the effort it would’ve taken without AI.<br>DaVinci Resolve is free because Blackmagic sells the cameras. Canva can give away Affinity because Canva’s own subscriber base pays for it somewhere else.<br>Adobe does have another business — Experience Cloud, the marketing empire built on Omniture and Marketo. It could subsidize Creative Cloud with it. For now, it doesn’t.<br>Though, unlike other clouds, there’s not really...