Seven free apps that copy the look and the tools of Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro are now out. They are open source and free under MIT and Apache licenses, and there are WebAssembly builds, which means versions that run inside your browser with nothing to install. The honest part first: the developer calls this a “super early alpha”, a first rough version, and commenters have pointed out many things that do not work yet.
So the practical move is a small one. Open the browser version and run one job you have already delivered through it. If the output holds up, you have a free seat for the occasional task, a quick crop, a single cut, one PDF. Keep paying for the work you cannot afford to redo. The developer said he would reach full feature parity within a month, then revised that to say 99 percent parity will be measured in months, not years. Treat both as a promise, not a date.
The part that matters more than the apps
One developer, Brandon Thomas, rebuilt seven interfaces of paid, closed software using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, in Rust, as “clean room” replacements, meaning written from scratch rather than copied from Adobe’s code. He says he has about a decade of large scale Rust work behind him, and that he has been coding only with AI tools since February.
That changes the price of a question you may already be asking: what are we actually paying this vendor for? If your team pays per seat for a tool and uses a narrow slice of it, and the real complexity sits in your process rather than in the vendor’s product, then building something that does your slice is now a much smaller job than it used to be. The apps stay free, by the way; the money comes from selling token based access to Artcraft’s own image generation model inside them.
One caveat. Rebuilding what software does, without copying its code, has generally been found legally acceptable, but these apps could still face trouble over “trade dress”, the familiar look and layout of Adobe’s interface, if they mimic it too closely. A tool built for your business has no reason to look like anyone else’s, which keeps you out of that fight entirely.
