We noted this trend in our newsletter recently, and SaaS founders should take note…

AI tools that take apart existing software and rebuild it are now producing free versions of some of the world's best-known paid programs. In recent weeks, one developer used AI to release free clones of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, after earlier releasing free Adobe alternatives, including a Photoshop replacement.

A free tool called Reverse Engineer Anything has also spread quickly among developers. It lets anyone point an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude at an existing app or website and have it rebuild its own version.

This is different from vibe coding, where you describe what you want and the AI builds it from scratch. Reverse engineering starts from a finished product and works backwards, which makes it better suited to large, complicated programs. Reverse Engineer Anything is a free, public project that works on desktop programs, Android apps, web apps and websites, so in principle almost any software a business pays a subscription for could be targeted.

Dana McKay, associate dean at RMIT University in Australia, says some people are hailing it as a return to the early internet, when much software was free to use and change. She also lists the catches. Some of the clones already have strange bugs, which are hard to fix when most of the code was written by AI.

Files may stop working between different versions, so a document from a free Word clone might not open properly in the real thing. And copying the software does not copy the data behind it. A Photoshop clone does not come with the data that powers Adobe's own AI tools, and a Facebook clone would have none of the behavioural data that makes Facebook's advertising work.

The legal position is also unsettled. Because reverse engineering does not break software locks, it may not breach US copyright law, but that is likely to be tested in court.

TechCentral republished McKay's analysis from The Conversation, which concludes that clones probably will not bring back the free software of the 1990s, but will usher in a time when traditional ways of charging for software stop working.

Tom's Hardware reported that the developer behind the Office and Adobe clones has said design tools from Autodesk and other subscription services could be next. MindStudio describes Reverse Engineer Anything as a low-risk experiment for anyone paying for an app with more features than they use.

For anyone running a software business, the lesson is that a list of features is no longer much protection. If a tool can watch your product and rebuild it in days, customers will eventually ask what they are paying for. The companies most at risk are the ones whose value is mainly the software itself.

The ones best placed are those selling something a clone cannot copy. That includes data built up over years, a network of users that gets more valuable as it grows, reliability and support, trust and compliance, and the integrations that make a tool part of someone's daily work.

Take the platform this newsletter runs on, Beehiiv. A clone of it already exists. What the clone cannot copy is Beehiiv's email delivery reputation, its network of newsletters recommending each other and its ad network, because they depend on years of data and thousands of other publishers.

That is the question every South African SaaS founder should ask now: if your app were cloned tomorrow, what would customers still pay you for? It is the same pressure we saw when Claude's office tools went free and when Miro sold at 92% below its peak.

You might also like our piece on Mario 64 in mixed reality, Max Blade's hivecoding, and Samro's AI music rules.

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