Adobe Wants $840 a Year. ArtCraft Cloned the Suite for Free.

Adobe would like $69.99 a month for Creative Cloud Pro, which works out to about $840 a year, every year, with an early termination fee if you try to leave inside the term. That price is the entire business case for what happened next. A project called ArtCraft is rebuilding the Adobe suite as free, open source software, app for app, interface for interface, and giving it away under MIT and Apache licenses with no account, no telemetry, and no subscription of any kind.

The suite is called the Crafting Apps. Thirteen of them, all written from scratch in Rust by a team led by Brandon Thomas, the engineer behind Storyteller.ai and FakeYou. They are clean room reimplementations, which means the builders copied the behaviour, the menus, and the shortcuts from public documentation and observation, not Adobe code. If your hands know Photoshop, the project promises they already know PhotoCraft.

The lineup

The Adobe seven come first, and the naming scheme is not subtle:

• PhotoCraft takes on Photoshop. Status on the project site: early alpha.
• VectorCraft takes on Illustrator. In development.
• FilmCraft takes on Premiere Pro. In development.
• LightCraft takes on Lightroom. In development.
• EffectCraft takes on After Effects. In development.
• DesignCraft takes on InDesign. In development.
• PdfCraft takes on Acrobat. Early alpha.

Then the ambition spills past Adobe. FigCraft targets Figma, WordCraft targets Word, GridCraft targets Excel, DeckCraft targets PowerPoint, SoundCraft targets Pro Tools, and CADCraft targets AutoCAD. Everything runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and every app except FilmCraft also runs in a browser tab as a WebAssembly build. Windows gets an MSI installer or a portable ZIP, macOS gets a DMG, and Linux gets AppImage, Flatpak, and DEB options. A launcher installs the whole set and keeps it updated.

PhotoCraft is the proof of concept

The flagship shows how serious this is. The PhotoCraft repository went public on September 30, and inside a month it passed 74,000 stars on GitHub, with 18 releases and more than 7,000 commits. It ships 68 tools, layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, live type, vector shapes, and a brush engine that responds to pen pressure and tilt. It opens and saves real PSD and PSB files, reads layered TIFF, Krita, GIMP, and Paint.NET documents, and exports everything from PNG and WebP to OpenEXR.

The real app at work: PhotoCraft on the Great Wave, Curves editor open, six layers deep. Screenshot: the ArtCraft project

The number that matters is the round trip test. Open a Photoshop file, save it again, and check whether the picture survives. In the project testing, 307 of 309 test files kept their render. The project roadmap is unusually honest about the rest: it scores PhotoCraft at roughly 76 percent of Photoshop for feature breadth and about 45 percent for readiness to do real client work. Those are the builders own numbers, and they tell you exactly where this stands. Broad, fast, and not finished.

Levels and Vibrance stacked on Monet, with the live histogram watching. Screenshot: the ArtCraft project

The rest of the bench

FilmCraft edits with the three point workflow editors expect, plus trim tools, a colour grading suite, more than 90 effects, and a basic set of audio tools. LightCraft develops RAW files with the light and colour controls photographers live in, plus masking and a starter set of presets. EffectCraft and DesignCraft are earlier in their curves, and the project site labels the whole family plainly: alpha software, under heavy construction, with a public feature tracker showing what works and what is still missing.

Built by AI, built for AI

The Dirty Static angle is the construction method. Press coverage of the repos reports the code was written largely with AI coding tools, and whatever your feelings about that, the output is not a demo. It is thirteen native apps with installers, checksums, and a release cadence most funded startups would envy.

Then the project does something no incumbent would. Every Crafting App can be driven three ways besides its own interface: a command line, a JSON control channel, and an MCP server. An AI agent can open your PSD, adjust the layers, export the result, and close the file, using the same engine you use with a mouse. Adobe spent decades building tools for human hands. ArtCraft built the same class of tools with a machine door cut into the side from day one. That is the part of this story that outlives the price fight.

The fine print

Alpha means alpha. The documentation warns in plain language that these apps are not ready to replace the Adobe tools for daily professional work. FilmCraft cannot open Premiere project files yet, and its exports still run on the CPU, so renders are slower than a GPU pipeline. The plugin ecosystems are not there, which means no VST instruments in SoundCraft and no OpenFX effects in FilmCraft. Work on copies of anything that matters.

Two more warnings. The same team runs a separate AI image and video studio, also called ArtCraft, which sells generation credits. That studio is a business. The Crafting Apps are the free and open source part, and the two should not be confused. And because the project went viral in weeks, copycat guide sites with similar names are already circling it. Download only from the official site or the official GitHub organisation, and check the published SHA256 checksums if you want to be careful.

The verdict

If you are a hobbyist, a student, a lapsed subscriber, or a Linux user Adobe forgot years ago, install PhotoCraft and LightCraft today and open some real files. You will know inside ten minutes whether your work fits inside the 45 percent that is ready. If your rent depends on Photoshop or Premiere, keep paying Adobe and watch the feature tracker, because the trajectory is the story. A month ago none of this existed in public. The suite is free, the source is open, the roadmap is honest, and the meter is no longer running.

Sources

• The Crafting Apps lineup and statuses: getartcraft.com/apps
• PhotoCraft source, features, and test results: github.com/storytold/photocraft
• Creative Cloud pricing and suite overview: How-To Geek