After Office and Adobe, it's Shopify's turn

In the first two weeks of October, a developer in Atlanta released free, AI-built alternatives to Photoshop, Acrobat, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. A few days later Paul Ford put out Tiny Little Office, a ten-app office suite that runs in your browser with no login. The headlines wrote themselves: someone vibe-coded Adobe, someone vibe-coded Office. Windows Central went with "Begun, the clone wars have."

I run product at Octabiz, so I read those stories as a warning to a much bigger group than Adobe and Microsoft: every company that charges you rent for something that is no longer hard to build.

I think Shopify is on that list. Nobody is going to clone it over a weekend, and that isn't my argument. My argument is that the hard part Shopify used to charge for, getting a store online, has become the easy part.

What the clone wave actually showed

The developer behind the Adobe and Office alternatives, Brandon Thomas, told Al Jazeera he built them with Anthropic's Claude and the Rust programming language. Adobe's package costs an individual $69.99 a month on an annual contract. His versions cost nothing.

They are not as good as Photoshop, and a University of Sussex law academic quoted by Al Jazeera raised fair questions about how they were made. Still, one engineer working with an AI model got far enough, fast enough, to make Adobe and Microsoft the punchline of a week of tech news. Sensor Tower figures show that new apps on Apple's App Store roughly doubled in the first half of 2026, to about 560,000. Building software is no longer the scarce part.

When building gets cheap, it's worth asking what you are still paying an incumbent for. Part of it is real value, like years of polish, reliability and a big ecosystem. Part of it is a toll: fees that exist because leaving is hard, while the work itself is easy.

Shopify's real price is not on the pricing page

Shopify is a good product, and I'd rather say so up front. If you want the largest choice of themes and third-party apps, or you sell across many countries at big scale, Shopify is probably still the right call.

But look at what a small shop with one physical location signs up for. Shopify's Basic plan is $39 a month, or $29 a month if you pay for the year. That's the number people remember. Then the rest arrives.

Point of sale for your counter is a separate subscription: POS Pro is $89 a month for each location. If you'd rather use a card processor other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own fee on top of whatever your processor charges, 2% of every sale on Basic. Most other needs get met with apps; a September 2026 scan of 300 high-traffic Shopify stores found they run about 14 each on average. And new sales channels bring new cuts. When ChatGPT checkout arrived, merchants learned they would pay an additional 4% fee on those sales.

None of this is hidden; most of it is on Shopify's own pricing page. Read together, though, it shows where the money is made. The store builder is cheap. A counter, a processor you already trust, a delivery route or a proper invoice each turns into another subscription, a percentage or an app.

Shopify knows the ground moved

On 1 October, Shopify launched Canvas, a way to build an online store by chatting with AI. It's a smart move. It also means the company that built its name on "start a store without code" now treats the store itself as the easy part, which leaves small business owners with a fair question: what am I paying for every month, and do I still need it?

What we are building instead

Octabiz isn't a Shopify clone, and it isn't free. We started from a different question: what if the shop, the counter and the back office were one product on one plan, with one login?

In Octabiz, the online store and checkout, the point of sale, stock counts and low-stock alerts, customer records, and invoices and estimates linked to orders all come in the same plan, and delivery routes with a driver app are built in. You don't have to assemble a stack of apps to get there. Bookkeeping is free for one person, and Core starts at $38 a month, a dollar less than Shopify Basic. Pro adds room for more people and locations.

We built it this way because of the stores we work with. One of the first is an independent rug dealer. A rug store doesn't sell 400 units of one product. It sells one 9x12 hand-knotted rug, once, often after several visits and a measurement, and then may clean and repair it for years. Software designed around stock-keeping units and add-on apps is an awkward fit for that kind of business.

If you are on Shopify today and want to see what moving looks like, we copy your products and store pages, you check the new shop, and your Shopify store stays live until the Octabiz one is ready.

Where this leaves small shops

When the Adobe clones came out, the developer behind them declared that software is over. I disagree. People will keep paying for software that saves them real work. What I expect to fade is the habit of charging small businesses again and again for the parts that were never hard.

Shopify the product is good at what it does, and I have no quarrel with that. My quarrel is with the idea that a small shop needs a plan, a POS subscription, a payment penalty and a dozen apps to run one store. That's what we're building Octabiz to replace.