Picture this: you’re setting up a new PC, you just need to read one PDF, and suddenly Adobe Acrobat wants your login and is pitching you other products. Most of us would sigh and click through it. This AI professional, Matthew Berman, built his own PDF reader instead.
He called it Folio. It reads and edits PDFs, handles e-signing, and lets you ask AI questions about the document. I laughed at how petty the origin story was, then his bigger point got me thinking: the math on buying software may have flipped.
💸 Why it matters
The creator says three things had to line up for regular people to build their own apps, and he thinks they finally have:
- The models got good enough.
- Tokens got cheap enough.
- Agents made the whole thing easy enough.
His favorite test shows how far this has come. He gives a model a simple prompt, “go clone Excel.” Older models got close but left rough edges. The latest ones, he says, finish a browser-based clone in about 90 minutes to a couple of hours, for maybe $10 in tokens.
Compare that with $180 for a standalone Excel license or $7 to $10 a month for a subscription. He claims full feature parity. I’d want to stress test “every feature” myself, but even a version that covers what you actually use is a wild deal for ten bucks.
He’s not the only one doing this. Artcraft is a free, open source take on the Adobe suite, with PhotoCraft, VectorCraft and FilmCraft. According to the expert, its developer pointed AI at existing software and told it to iterate until it matched.
🛠️ How to try it yourself
The author’s own builds make a pretty good recipe:
- Pick an app that annoys you. His second target was a YouTube analytics tool, 1of10, which had grown bloated and started demanding a login.
- List only the features you use. That’s the whole advantage, since nobody else’s needs get in the way.
- Point an agent at it. Tell it to clone the app and keep iterating until it works.
- Add to it over time. He built Outlier Tracker, his 1of10 replacement, in about 30 minutes.
- Share it if you like. Open source lets other people fork your version and change it for a fraction of the original cost.
💡 Tips and reality checks
- Start small. A PDF reader is a far better first project than rebuilding Excel.
- Think about upkeep. Building it is only half the job, and the creator admits that security and updates are the common argument against this. His answer is that better models write sturdier code, and an always-on agent could keep patching it for less than a subscription.
- Check open source first. Someone may already be maintaining what you need, so you might not have to build anything.
- Keep an eye on Omarchy. It’s a new AI-friendly operating system from the creator of Ruby on Rails, built so you can customize it however you want.
His prediction is that software’s value is heading toward zero and that most of it will effectively become open source. I’m not sold on all of that yet, especially for anything that handles sensitive data. Still, I’m looking at my subscriptions a little differently now.
🚀 See it in action
Check out the full video to see Folio, Outlier Tracker and the Excel clone running, then try building one tiny app for yourself. Your first victim could be whichever program nagged you most this week.