Travis Boatman

Software is over? Brandon Thomas, who describes himself as a software veteran with about 15 years in the industry and roughly a decade of work in Rust, is building the suite under the name Artcraft. He used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 to write the replacements in Rust. The set is meant to cover more than photo editing: Photocraft for Photoshop, Vectorcraft for Illustrator, Filmcraft for Premiere, Lightcraft for Lightroom, Effectcraft for After Effects, Designcraft for InDesign, and Printcraft for Acrobat Pro. The apps are free, with no subscription. Thomas says users can download the source, change it, and send fixes. He also says the project has a team behind it and will not be dropped after the announcement. On the timeline, he first said Artcraft would reach 100 percent parity with the Adobe apps within a month. In comments on Hacker News he pulled that back, while still saying 99 percent parity would take months rather than years. That gap between the claim and the current software is already visible. The apps are early, and people trying them have reported trouble with basic functions. They can resemble the Adobe programs they are named against, but the early reports do not describe them as ready replacements for tools that have been in professional use for years. Thomas ties the project to Adobe’s cancellation fees. In June 2024 the US government sued Adobe, alleging that the company hid early-termination charges and made subscriptions hard to cancel. Customers who ended certain annual plans early could be charged about half of the remaining payments. Adobe disputed that account and said its terms were clear and cancellation was straightforward. In March 2026 the company agreed to a $150 million settlement: $75 million in civil penalties and $75 million in free services for customers, plus clearer fee disclosures and an easier way to cancel. Adobe continued to deny wrongdoing. How seven free apps stay funded is a separate question. Thomas says Artcraft’s other business, selling tokens for AI image and video models, will help pay for development. He is also asking users to file bugs and contribute code. The legal exposure is left open. A suite that tracks Adobe’s products too closely is the sort of thing Adobe would be expected to notice, even if the public case against Adobe’s subscription practices has already been made in court and in the settlement. Existing free options already cover part of this ground, including GIMP, Krita, and Photopea for Photoshop-type work. Artcraft’s pitch is that an Adobe-like layout would make the switch easier, without the subscription or the cost of leaving early. Thomas expects other developers to do the same thing with other paid software. In his words, people can now make highly performant, cross-platform, clean-room equivalents that match the function of existing apps, and nothing is stopping them. He extends that to search, phones, and infrastructure, and to stripping ads out of software. The line he put on the project is the one in the headline: “Software is over.”