Paying $113 a month for Adobe? Meet ArtCraft, its new free competitor

Quick one. If you're paying Adobe every month, you'll want to read this.

A developer has just used AI to rebuild Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign, from scratch. Better yet, he's giving them away for free. It's called ArtCraft, and it's been all over the internet this past week.

We're a packaging company, not software reviewers. For a lot of us, times are tight, and every subscription is getting the side-eye. We figured $113 is a lot of mailers, so we had a play. Here's what we found.

The short version

• What it is: ArtCraft is a set of free, open-source apps that look and work like Adobe's (plus a few Microsoft Office ones).
• Who made it: Developer Brandon Thomas, former CEO of Storyteller.ai, using AI coding tools.
• What it costs: $0. Runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Most of the apps also run in your browser.
• The catch: It's early alpha. Expect bugs and missing features. It's not a full Photoshop replacement yet.
• Our take: Worth an afternoon for everyday jobs. Don't cancel Adobe tomorrow.

No affiliation, nobody's paying us. Prices and numbers are as of 13 October 2026.

What is ArtCraft?

ArtCraft started out as an AI image and video studio. The bit everyone's talking about is its Crafting Apps: 12 desktop apps written from scratch, each one modelled on software you probably already know.

The Adobe-style ones:

• PhotoCraft for image editing (think Photoshop)
• VectorCraft for logos and illustration (think Illustrator)
• FilmCraft for video editing (think Premiere)
• LightCraft for organising and editing photos (think Lightroom)
• PdfCraft for reading, combining, splitting and securing PDFs (think Acrobat)
• EffectCraft for motion graphics (think After Effects)
• DesignCraft for page layout (think InDesign)

There's even WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus SoundCraft for audio and CADCraft for drafting.

They're open source under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licences. In plain English: free to use, including for your business.

Who built it, and why?

Brandon Thomas, a developer who previously ran Storyteller.ai and worked as a software engineer at Square (PetaPixel). He built the apps with AI coding agents. KDnuggets reports he used Claude.

His motivation is refreshingly petty. In a Reddit comment quoted by PetaPixel, he said of Adobe: "They charged me the 'cancellation fee' on multiple occasions and I've hated them ever since."

Honestly? We get it. We once built our own post-purchase survey rather than keep paying $99 a month for one. Different scale. Same itch.

How much could you save? (Australian prices)

Here's what Adobe charges in Australia, straight from adobe.com/au. Prices include GST, on an annual plan paid monthly, as of 13 October 2026.

Adobe app	Adobe price (AUD)	Free ArtCraft alternative
Photoshop	A$35.99/mo	PhotoCraft
Acrobat Pro	A$31.99/mo	PdfCraft
Lightroom	A$18.99/mo	LightCraft
Illustrator	Included in Creative Cloud Pro	VectorCraft
Premiere	Included in Creative Cloud Pro	FilmCraft
After Effects	Included in Creative Cloud Pro	EffectCraft
InDesign	Included in Creative Cloud Pro	DesignCraft
Creative Cloud Pro (20+ apps)	A$113.49/mo (A$1,361.88/yr)	All of the above: $0

That's A$1,361.88 a year, per person. Got a team plan? Creative Cloud Pro for business is A$157.99 a month per licence. That adds up fast.

Look familiar? What it's actually like

Free alternatives to Adobe aren't new. GIMP, Photopea, Inkscape and LibreOffice have been around for years. The problem, as KDnuggets points out, has always been switching costs: different menus, different shortcuts, different everything. Nobody has time to relearn their tools.

ArtCraft goes the other way. PhotoCraft puts the menus, panels, tools and shortcuts where Photoshop users expect them. It opens and saves layered Photoshop (.psd) files. It has layers, masks, adjustment layers, type and brushes, plus Select Subject that runs on your own computer, no account needed.

Yep, that's PhotoCraft, not Photoshop. Screenshot from ArtCraft's press kit.

The team calls it a "clean-room reimplementation", built "from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets." (PhotoCraft on GitHub). It isn't affiliated with Adobe.

FilmCraft and PdfCraft get the same treatment for video and PDFs.

The honest bit: can it replace Photoshop?

Not yet. And to their credit, ArtCraft says so themselves. PhotoCraft's GitHub page calls it early alpha and says it "is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. The biggest gaps are AI/generative features, 15 missing tools, depth in typography and pro workflows, and plug-in compatibility."

The team at OMG! Ubuntu took it for a spin and landed in a similar spot. It starts fast and looks the part, but "it is only a superficial similarity." Casual users doing basic edits won't notice much difference. Pros will notice the bugs, the missing features and the slightly different results. They also watched it chew through 5GB of RAM after opening a PSD. Their words: "just like the real Photoshop!" Fair.

A few other things worth knowing:

• It moves fast. PhotoCraft's first public code went up on 30 September 2026, with several releases since. Expect things to change (and break) week to week.
• The apps are free, but ArtCraft does sell plans. Those buy credits for its AI image and video tools, not the Craft apps.
• Watch this space legally. Adobe holds thousands of patents and nobody's sure yet how that plays out. No legal action has been reported.

What could a small business actually use it for?

If you run an online store, you probably don't need 20+ Adobe apps. You need the same handful of jobs done, over and over:

• Resizing and cropping product shots for Shopify and Instagram
• Cutting out backgrounds for clean product images
• Knocking up a quick social graphic or sale banner
• Combining or splitting PDFs: invoices, spec sheets, compliance docs
• Trimming a quick product video for Reels

That's exactly the stuff an early app is most likely to handle fine. It's the edge cases (fancy typography, plug-ins, print-ready artwork) where you'll hit walls. If you're making artwork for custom packaging, check the file carefully before it goes to print. Yes, including when it's coming to us.

How to try it without getting burnt

1. Download from the source only. Get it from getartcraft.com or ArtCraft's official GitHub. Anything that goes viral this fast attracts dodgy copycats.
2. Test on copies. Open copies of your real files, never the originals.
3. Run both for a bit. Keep Adobe until ArtCraft has handled a few weeks of your actual work.
4. Check your Adobe plan before you cancel. On Adobe's annual plan paid monthly, cancelling after the first 14 days means "a cancellation fee of 50% of the remaining balance of your contract obligation may apply" (Adobe). Check when your year renews and time it right. Adobe also offers a monthly plan with no annual commitment if you want a halfway house.

Not ready for alpha software? Free tools that work today

• Canva: the free plan covers a lot of small business design. You probably already use it.
• Affinity: Canva made Affinity free in late 2025, rolling Photo, Designer and Publisher into one app. The AI features need a paid Canva plan (TechRadar).
• Photopea: a free, browser-based, Photoshop-style editor that's been around for years (photopea.com).
• GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice: the old guard. Free and capable, but you'll be relearning where everything is.

What is REA, and why is everyone talking about it?

ArtCraft isn't the only thing going viral. REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, is an open-source tool that lets AI coding agents like Claude Code, Codex and Cursor look inside an app and work out how a feature works, without the original source code. It has around 155,000 stars on GitHub (basically developer likes) as of 13 October 2026, most of them racked up in a matter of days.

To be clear, ArtCraft says it was built clean-room, not by pulling Adobe's software apart. And REA is a developer tool, so you don't need it. Its own disclaimer says it's for "lawful research, education, interoperability, software preservation, and analysis of software you own or are authorized to examine."

But together, they point the same way. AI has made it dramatically cheaper for one person to build software that used to take a whole team years. KDnuggets put it well: "the real threat to Adobe and Microsoft is not another free alternative. It is software that looks familiar, delivers the same essential features, and gives users no compelling reason to keep paying."

For small businesses, that's good news. The tools you rely on are about to get a lot cheaper. Expect heaps more of this.

Our take

We're not cancelling anything this week. But we've been playing around with it, and we'll keep poking at it. If you're paying $113 a month and mostly resizing product photos, it's worth an afternoon.

Give it a go and tell us what you think. Found a free tool that's saved your bacon? We'd love to hear about it. Email hello@heapsgoodpackaging.com.au or slide into our DMs on Instagram.

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