Figma, Adobe and 'Good‑Enough' AI

Figma came public on July 31, 2025, and by early April 2026 its investor page was showing the stock around $20.97, far below the excitement that followed its listing. The drop is landing even though Figma just reported fourth-quarter revenue of $303.8 million, up 40% from a year earlier. (figma.com 1) (figma.com 2) The numbers get stranger when you look underneath. Figma said full-year 2025 revenue reached $1.056 billion, but it also reported a full-year operating loss of about $1.3 billion under standard accounting and said it plans to keep investing in artificial intelligence and the broader platform. (figma.com) That is the setup for the selloff: investors are no longer paying up just because a software company says “artificial intelligence.” In 2026, they want to know whether the new features raise prices, cut labor, or lock customers into a workflow they cannot easily replace. (figma.com) (adobe.com) Adobe is feeling the same pressure from the other side of the market. Its Firefly page now sells access through monthly “generative credits,” while also advertising limited-time unlimited generations on selected models and bundling models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Runway, and others into one login. (adobe.com 1) (adobe.com 2) That bundle tells you what changed. If the image model inside the product can be swapped out like batteries in a flashlight, the model stops being the moat and the product around it has to do the hard work. (adobe.com) Krita shows how quickly “good enough” can spread once the software is free. Krita’s site calls it a professional free and open-source painting program, and its March 24, 2026 release added major new features while keeping the price at zero. (krita.org 1) (krita.org 2) Krita had already moved into artificial intelligence tools before that release. In December 2024, it published the Fast Sketch plugin, built with Intel, which can automatically ink a sketch with neural networks and can even be trained on a user’s own before-and-after drawings on local hardware. (krita.org) That does not mean Krita replaces Adobe Photoshop or Figma for every team. It means a paid vendor can no longer assume that adding one more text-to-image button will keep hobbyists, freelancers, students, or small studios paying every month. (krita.org) (adobe.com) Figma’s problem is more specific because its core business was never just drawing rectangles on a screen. It built its reputation on multiplayer design, shared component libraries, comments, handoff to developers, and one browser-based workspace where product teams could work together in real time. (figma.com) That collaborative layer is also why Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20 billion in September 2022, and why the deal died on December 18, 2023 after regulators blocked a path to approval. Adobe was not buying a paintbrush; it was trying to buy the room where modern software teams make decisions together. (adobe.com) (europa.eu) So the market is drawing a line between artificial intelligence that is a feature and software that is a system of record. The companies with the best odds of defending prices are the ones tied to proprietary company data, regulated approvals, procurement systems, or workflows where saving one hour or one legal mistake is easy to measure in dollars. (figma.com) (adobe.com) For everyone else, “has artificial intelligence” is starting to look like “has search” or “has cloud sync”: necessary, but not special. Once free tools and bundled tools can do 80% of the trick, the premium only holds if the product owns the team, the data, or the outcome. (krita.org) (adobe.com)