How AI apps are offering free substitutes for Big Tech software

Key points

• A Reddit user shared ArtCraft, a free rebuild of Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office.
• The software engineer behind ArtCraft is Brandon Thomas, based in Atlanta, US.
• Legal questions remain about how much code AI wrote versus Thomas.

A Reddit user named Brandon Thomas has shared a project called ArtCraft, a free rebuild of Adobe's Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated services are named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft. The Adobe package usually costs individuals $779.99 per year if paid upfront or $69.99 per month on an annual contract.

Earlier this week, ArtCraft also released copies of the Microsoft Office suite. These include WordCraft, DeckCraft, and GridCraft, taking on Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The software engineer behind the packages is based in the United States, but the programmes are available worldwide.

Who is behind ArtCraft

Reddit user u/ai_art_is_art has been revealed as Atlanta, US-based software engineer Brandon Thomas. He said he used AI platform Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust software to reverse engineer Adobe's creative suite.

Thomas said the project is not a one-off flash in the pan. He described himself as a 15-year industry veteran who has worked on payment rails and robotics, and said he was fed up with cancellation fees on software products.

We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshi**ify the entire tech world.

— Brandon Thomas

Vibe coding and legal questions

Vibe coding is a new term for prompting AI tools to generate code rather than writing it manually. The phrase was introduced by computer scientist and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February 2025. The New York Times reported that Sensor Tower estimates new apps doubled in the first half of this year to about 560,000.

Thomas described his Adobe-similar apps as clean-room replacements, built from scratch from publicly available file-format specifications. However, Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, said it is unknown whether the claimed clean-room process stands up to scrutiny.