Crash-proof autosave for professional vector work

A designer is three hours into a complex illustration when their app quits without warning. They reopen the file and find themselves back at a save they made before lunch. The complaint 'it crashes generally once or twice in an 8 hour window' isn't describing a rare edge case — it's describing a reliable weekly tax on professional output.

The gap persists because the vector app vendors have no structural incentive to fix it aggressively. Adobe's revenue doesn't go down when you lose an hour of work — yours does. Affinity sold you a perpetual license and is done. The person who suffers the loss and the person who built the software have completely misaligned incentives.

What's missing isn't just autosave — Illustrator has autosave. What's missing is continuous, versioned, recoverable state that works at the file system level independently of whether the app itself is alive. Native autosave bakes into the app's own process, which means when the app freezes or crashes mid-write, the autosave file itself can be corrupted. Users describe crashes that are 'sporadic and unpredictable' — meaning they can't time a manual save to protect themselves, and they can't trust the app's own recovery mechanism because it lives inside the same process that just died.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs every week for anyone doing professional vector work, the incumbent has no reason to build it properly, and the cost of not having it is measurable: billable hours lost, client deadlines missed, work redone from memory. A freelance illustrator billing at $80/hour who loses 2 hours a week to crash recovery is losing over $8,000 a year. That's a real number that justifies a recurring subscription.

What to build

Build a background file-watcher for macOS and Windows that snapshots open Illustrator, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher files to a local versioned store every 60 seconds using file system APIs entirely outside the host application's process, and exposes a timeline UI to restore any snapshot from the past 30 days.

Where to start

Start with Affinity Designer on macOS, where the user base is disproportionately freelancers who switched specifically to escape Adobe's subscription and are therefore already price-sensitive, vocal about software reliability, and not locked into an enterprise IT environment that would block a third-party background process.

The hard part

Getting reliable file snapshots of documents that are actively being written to by another process without corrupting the snapshot — especially Illustrator's proprietary .ai format, which doesn't behave like a simple flat file during writes.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per seat, around $6-9/month, with a 14-day free trial that requires no credit card — expansion path charges for cloud backup of the version history rather than local-only storage.