One Developer Rebuilt Adobe and Microsoft Office for Free - and You Own the Code
Most of the software your business runs on is rented. Stop paying, and it stops working. Sometimes you even pay to stop paying.
That last part is what pushed one developer to do something about it. Brandon Thomas, the founder of ArtCraft, has released a whole family of desktop apps - image editing, video, PDFs, documents, slides, spreadsheets and more - that are free to use, open source, and built so that the code belongs to you, not to a vendor.
We’ve been following the project closely since it launched. Here’s what it is, how to get it, and the honest caveats - our read as of October 2026.
What ArtCraft released
At the start of October 2026, Thomas announced seven free creative apps, each written from scratch in a programming language called Rust. As PetaPixel and Cybernews reported, he built them with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 AI model - and the trigger was frustration with the cancellation fees that come with some yearly software subscriptions. Cybernews puts the typical fee at half of the year’s remaining balance.
He wasn’t shy about the point of it all:
“No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They’re open source.”
- Brandon Thomas, Software Developer
Two weeks later, seven apps had become thirteen. The family now covers office work and engineering too, and the project page simply says “More crafts on the way.” On the day we wrote this, a fourteenth project - a 2D animation editor called AniCraft - had just appeared on their GitHub. The existing apps move just as fast: PhotoCraft went from version 0.1.1 on 3 October to 0.9.0 on 14 October.
Thirteen apps, and counting
Each app is described on its own project page in the same way: an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of a well-known commercial app. “Clean-room” means it was built from public specifications and from watching how the original behaves - not by copying or decompiling anyone’s code. Here’s the line-up, in the project’s own words:
| App | What it does | Its makers call it a clean-room reimplementation of |
|---|---|---|
| PhotoCraft | Image editing | Adobe Photoshop |
| VectorCraft | Vector illustration | Adobe Illustrator |
| FilmCraft | Video editing, color and sound | Adobe Premiere Pro |
| LightCraft | Photo library and raw development | Adobe Lightroom |
| PdfCraft | Reading, organizing and protecting PDFs | Adobe Acrobat |
| EffectCraft | Motion graphics and visual effects | Adobe After Effects |
| DesignCraft | Page layout and publishing | Adobe InDesign |
| FigCraft | Interface design and prototyping | Figma |
| WordCraft | Writing and document design | Microsoft Word |
| DeckCraft | Presentations and slide shows | Microsoft PowerPoint |
| GridCraft | Spreadsheets and data | Microsoft Excel |
| SoundCraft | Recording, editing and mixing audio | Avid Pro Tools |
| CADCraft | Computer-aided design and drafting | Autodesk AutoCAD |
All of them run on Windows, macOS and Linux as real desktop apps, and twelve of the thirteen also run in a browser tab. Everything works on your own files, on your own computer - nothing is sent to someone else’s cloud while you work.
Free to use, yours to own
“Free” on its own isn’t the interesting part - plenty of apps are free until they aren’t. The interesting part is that the source code is public, under licences that let you keep it. The apps are released under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licences, two of the most permissive open-source licences there are: you can use the software, change it and build on it, including at work. (As always, read the licence file in each project before you rely on it.)
In practice there are three ways to get them, from “just let me use it” to “I want my own copy of everything”:
Download the launcher
One small app that installs any of the thirteen, picks the right version for your computer and updates them with a click. The easy option.
Fork it on GitHub
“Forking” makes your own copy of a project inside your GitHub account. It’s yours to change, and it stays there whatever happens to the original.
Clone it to your machine
“Cloning” downloads the full code to your own computer, so you can build the apps yourself and keep every version.
The launcher is on the ArtCraft apps page, and all the code lives on ArtCraft’s GitHub. The launcher also checks every download against a published checksum - a digital fingerprint - before installing it, so you know the file is the one the team released.
The honest part
We’ll be blunt: this is very new software, and the team says so itself. Most of the apps are marked “in development” or “early alpha” - the stage where things work, but not everything works, and bugs are expected. PhotoCraft’s own project page says plainly that it is not yet a replacement for daily professional work, and lists the gaps: generative AI features, a number of tools, depth in typography and professional workflows, and plug-in support.
The press coverage adds two fair points. Professionals who depend on exact colour, plug-ins and support will be slow to switch to brand-new software. And while “clean-room” is the standard way to stay clear of copyright problems, PetaPixel notes that other legal questions, such as software patents, are still open for projects like this.
Try them now on real but non-critical work: a side project, an internal document, a quick edit. Don’t cancel a subscription your team depends on the day you install the launcher. Give it a few months, keep backups of your files, and watch how fast the gaps close.
Bigger plans
The project has drawn a lot of attention quickly - PhotoCraft alone had more than 60,000 stars on GitHub (people bookmarking and following it) when we checked on 14 October. Thomas answered the most common questions on LinkedIn: the apps are clean-room implementations, with no decompiled software and no copied code; he is an experienced engineer; and a solid group of core contributors has formed around the project. His fourth point is the one we’re watching: “We have big plans, and I’ll communicate more shortly.”
It started with creative tools, then office apps, then audio and CAD. The direction is clear even if the details aren’t: a growing set of everyday business software that nobody can take away from you.
Software you own forever
Subscriptions aren’t going away, and for some tools they’ll stay the right choice. But for the first time in a long while, there’s a serious attempt at a full set of everyday creative and office apps that are free, open, and yours to keep. Download the launcher, try a couple of the apps, and if you like what you see, fork the code. Whatever happens next, your copy stays yours.
Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. Microsoft, Word, PowerPoint and Excel are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Figma is a trademark of Figma, Inc. Pro Tools and Avid are trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. AutoCAD and Autodesk are trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. These names are used only to describe the apps as their makers describe them. HadesFlow is not affiliated with ArtCraft or with any of these companies, and ArtCraft describes its apps as independent projects.