The New Adobe Tax Is Model Lock-In

The old Adobe tax was a suite you could not leave because the files lived there. The new one is a model you cannot leave because the work lives in its chat, its Discord, its credit pack.

You feel it when Flux would have been the better still but you already paid ChatGPT this month. You feel it when the client wants type and your Midjourney subscription cannot spell. Lock-in moved from the file format to the lens. OpenRouter is the developer answer. A canvas is the creative one.

Why $7B is about this

Stripe reportedly buying OpenRouter is a bet that businesses will keep refusing a single lab. Developers already had a switchboard. Designers paid the tax in monthly seats. That is habit, billed on a card.

OpenRouter’s CEO called it Stripe for AI. A gateway does not care which model you use. A studio that only ships one model does. If your tool only has one lab, you will find reasons it is “your look.”

What ending the tax looks like

• Same brief, Flux then Nano Banana then GPT Image.
• Price on the bar, not a mystery credit. Pay-per-run.
• No seat that bills when the campaign pauses. One wallet, every model.
• The board still there when you switch. Keep context.

You can still have favorites. Favorites are not lock-in. Lock-in is when switching costs more than being wrong.

Pantr is not Adobe, not OpenRouter, and not Stripe. It is a place to put the work so the next model is a click, not a migration. €1.00 to start, or your key. Pay the run. Keep the files. Leave the suite when the frame needs a different lab.