The Economics of Bespoke Internal Software
I’m probably not the only one annoyed at Adobe Software’s licensing model, with its ever-increasing subscription pricing, combined with the incessant cross-selling ads in the products, and intrusive update reminders. So I decided to replace Adobe Acrobat with my own internal product written using Claude Code and Opus 5.5. It is called “MyPDF.” Figure 1. MyPDF Screenshot. The total cost of this effort was less than $20, and it took about six hours of my time. It is checked into a private repository on Github, and I can deploy new releases, as needed, in a matter of minutes. I’ve uninstalled Adobe Acrobat from all my internal systems and made “MyPDF” the default for *.pdf files. ...