I also recently entered into the world of embroidery software (disclaimer: I programmed embroiderybreeze.com). I can best describe it as these poor embroiderists have been held hostage by Big Embroidery for years. The software out there is old, and super expensive. My wife has embroidered a lot and got frustrated trying to digitize just some simple designs and asked if I could make software for her. When I looked at the multiple applications she used and the difficulty of it I was shocked. It was like 1998 level. Then I looked at the prices and I was shocked even more. So I started making software for her.

Now I will say there is more to embroidery than one might first expect. It's got some overlap with image editing but only to a point. The stitching really matters and to make it stitch out well requires sort of a lot of rules about how to do that. Most software is either $1000+ and requires you take a course, or there's a subscription but you're really just downloading designs and sending them to your machine. There's a fairly healthy market of people selling embroidery designs on Etsy in part I believe because digitizing for embroidery is not that easy and requires expensive software. So people often just buy designs rather than make them themselves.

To make things worse, basically no embroidery digitizing software was available on Android or iOS and it usually was just Windows. So I set out to build the easiest digitizing software which would also work on mobile devices which means you have to design around things like no key combos, no right click, etc. So while I expected it wouldn't be that hard to write embroidery digitizing software, I learned that just being able to send a PES/DST/etc file to a machine was really not the hard part. So kudos to the OP writing his own software. Gotta break that grip of Big Embroidery.

Wow. I’ve just entered the embroidery world myself. And yeah, Embrillance… it’s so clunky and poorly designed. The way they have broken the software into tiny pieces and charge hundreds for each piece. But it has this massive fanbase.

I did briefly look at what it would take to build a competitor, but it was a bit daunting. Kudos to you for giving it a go.

I do think AI will be a wreaking ball for the entire software industry.