Solo dev burns $2,000 in AI tokens to ship a free local Photoshop clone
aakashgupta · x · 2026-10-02
A solo developer spent roughly $2,000 in AI tokens to build Photon Studio, a free Photoshop clone that runs locally with no cloud uploads or account required. It supports layers, masks, smart objects, curves, liquify, subject selection, background removal, and native PSD files. Adobe shipped Photoshop in 1990 and employs about 30,000 people.
The cost breakdown is the interesting part:
- 47 prompt chains, roughly 2 million visible tokens
- Writing the code was cheap; the expense came from repeatedly feeding the growing codebase back into the model to fix its own bugs
- The bill scales with how much the model must remember, so each new feature costs more than the last
He's honest about limits: complex PSD files still break, and he recommends backing up files before saving. Day one brought 170 downloads.
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