ArtCraft releases 13 free, AI-assisted alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft apps

Free alternatives to Word, PowerPoint and Excel have joined ArtCraft’s push into Adobe’s territory. Software engineer Brandon Thomas has released 13 free, open-source apps built with AI assistance. They target core features of familiar paid programs, offering a subscription-free option while raising questions about setup, long-term usefulness and the legal boundaries of recreating software.

Familiar jobs, different software

Thomas, who posts on Reddit as u/ai_art_is_art, first shared ArtCraft’s Adobe-style tools last week. The project added Microsoft Office alternatives earlier this week, according to Al Jazeera. That takes its ambitions beyond creative work and into documents, presentations and spreadsheets. The programs are available worldwide.

The names make the intended comparisons easy to follow. PhotoCraft targets Photoshop, while PdfCraft is among the Adobe-like offerings. WordCraft, DeckCraft and GridCraft take on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, respectively. The stated aim is to reproduce core functions—not evidence that every feature or professional workflow has an equivalent.

The price contrast is substantial. Al Jazeera lists Adobe’s Creative Suite package at $779.99 a year paid upfront, or $69.99 a month under an annual contract. ArtCraft’s apps are free. Those prices explain the appeal, but they are not a like-for-like measure of what either suite can deliver.

AI assistance meets a clean-room claim

Thomas says he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust programming language to recreate Adobe’s suite. This is the practice often called vibe coding: asking AI to generate code from instructions rather than writing all of it manually. But Thomas rejects the suggestion that he is simply a casual AI-assisted programmer.

In his Reddit account, quoted by Al Jazeera, he described himself as a 15-year industry veteran with roughly a decade of Rust experience. He cited work on payment infrastructure, robotics and optics automation, and said the project would not be a short-lived experiment. Those are his credentials and maintenance assurances, rather than a demonstrated record for this new suite.

His legal explanation is more specific: he describes the Adobe-like apps as clean-room replacements, built from publicly available file-format specifications instead of Adobe’s proprietary source code. Intellectual-property scholar Andres Guadamuz, writing on his Technollama blog and cited by Al Jazeera, questions how much code Thomas and Claude each produced and whether the claimed process withstands scrutiny.

We also do not know whether the claimed ‘clean-room process’ stands up to scrutiny.

Andres Guadamuz, intellectual-property law scholar, quoted by Al Jazeera

The subscription savings come with setup work

Thomas says frustration with software cancellation fees helped motivate the project. CNET identifies a plausible audience: technically comfortable users who need only some functions and are willing to download and configure open-source software themselves. For those users, customization and avoiding recurring charges may matter more than getting an established commercial package.

CNET’s counterargument is practical rather than simply anti-AI. Some people will not want to do that setup work. Businesses and professional creators may prefer the safety and privacy assurances of established vendors, even though those assurances are not absolute. CNET also flags usefulness, security and long-term viability as concerns for vibe-coded apps generally.

Its immediate advice is to inspect an app’s privacy and safety policies before using it, particularly when it was built through vibe coding. Microsoft declined CNET’s request for comment; ArtCraft and Adobe did not immediately respond. None of those responses resolves the practical choice between paying for familiar tools and taking on more responsibility for a free alternative.