Developer Brandon Thomas has released Artcraft, a set of free, open-source applications built to replace seven of Adobe's best-known products. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, Vectorcraft takes on Illustrator, Filmcraft takes on Premiere, and Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft and Printcraft stand in for Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro.

Thomas says he built them in the Rust programming language using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, and that Adobe's cancellation fees were part of his motivation.

The apps are free, with no subscription, and anyone can download the source code, change it and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software veteran with 15 years of experience, about a decade of it in Rust, and says the project has team support and will not be abandoned.

His claims are big. He said the apps would reach full parity with Adobe's within a month, before walking that back on Hacker News to 99% parity taking months rather than years. The early reality is more modest: users have reported problems with basic functions, so the tools look like Adobe's but cannot yet replace them. Artcraft plans to fund development through a separate business selling tokens for AI image and video models.

The cancellation grievance has a history. In June 2024, the US government sued Adobe, alleging it hid early termination fees, which on some annual plans came to half the remaining payments, and made subscriptions hard to cancel. In March 2026, Adobe agreed to a $150-million settlement, about R2.5 billion, split between civil penalties and free services for customers, along with clearer disclosure and easier cancellation, while denying any wrongdoing.

TechSpot's Rob Thubron reported the launch and noted the obvious legal risk if the apps copy Adobe's too closely. Ars Technica first reported the project. The Hacker News discussion is where Thomas softened his timeline, and where developers tested the early builds.

Thomas's own prediction is sweeping: that free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid software will become common, and that "software is over".

Strip out the bold claims, and there is a real point underneath. AI has made it far cheaper to build software that looks and works like an existing product, so features on their own are a weaker defence than they used to be. That matters for every software company, and fits the repricing we saw when Miro sold at 92% below its peak.

But copying the interface was never the hard part of Photoshop. Reliability, file compatibility, support, integrations and years of trust are, and early users say, things Artcraft cannot yet do the basics. The more useful lesson for South African software businesses is about motive. Thomas built this partly out of anger at cancellation fees.

Make leaving painful and you hand customers a reason to look for, or now build, an alternative, which is why the click-to-cancel rules spreading overseas are worth getting ahead of.

You might also like our piece on OpenAI watermarking ChatGPT text in the EU, OpenAI holding back GPT-6.1 Astra, and why SA enterprise AI adoption keeps outrunning its own strategy.

Get more SA tech and business news and subscribe to The Open Letter.