Peter Griffin: The AI-powered newcomer taking on Adobe and Microsoft

Peter Griffin

Tech columnist·New Zealand Listener·

2 Nov, 2026 05:06 PM3 mins to read

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An AI-powered newcomer is creating free versions of expensive software. Photo / Getty Images

For decades, Adobe has sold creative professionals the essential tools of their trade.

Photographers need Photoshop. Designers need InDesign. Video editors need Premiere. Paying the subscription is simply part of being in business.

My needs are more modest. I just want to access Adobe’s Acrobat Pro software so I
can edit PDF documents. But I’m loath to pay $39 a month for the privilege.

Now, a small outfit called ArtCraft has offered a stark vision of the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” ‒ the disruption of the software‑as‑a‑service industry. Software is code, and artificial intelligence is incredibly good at writing it.

ArtCraft developers have produced seven free, open-source applications modelled on Adobe’s tools: Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat. Decades of software work were replicated in a development sprint lasting weeks.

Founder Brandon Thomas used Anthropic’s Claude coding technology, his knowledge of Photoshop, screenshots and tutorials to build PhotoCraft. Volunteers helped extend the approach across the other applications. The familiar Adobe-like menus and shortcuts are deliberate. Users should already know exactly where to click.

This is not the entire Adobe empire, perfectly rebuilt. These are young applications with missing features, bugs, and plenty still to prove. But I’m now using PDFCraft to edit PDFs – entirely for free. It works just fine.

Software companies have traditionally enjoyed two enormous advantages over newcomers: the expense of building sophisticated products and the difficulty of persuading customers to learn something different. AI is attacking the first. ArtCraft’s imitation cracks the second. Reviews of ArtCraft’s programs suggest they are 70% of the way to acting as true Adobe stand-ins. With the source code public, other developers will inspect it, improve it and distribute their own versions.

The astonishing thing is not that someone made a cheaper Photoshop alternative – those already existed. It is how quickly a tiny operation can now assemble a credible challenge across several notoriously complicated categories.

Adobe shareholders are rattled – at the time of writing, the company’s market value had dropped around 24% in the past year. Yet Adobe will not suddenly go out of business. A design agency won’t move confidential client work into an unfamiliar system overnight.

The question is what tools customers trust with what work. Students, hobbyists and small businesses have less invested in the status quo. For me, a free tool that does enough beats an expensive tool that does everything.

ArtCraft has done the same with Microsoft programs such as Word (WordCraft), Excel (GridCraft) and PowerPoint (DeckCraft).

All of this appears to be perfectly legal because ArtCraft’s band of developers didn’t use any of Adobe’s or Microsoft’s software code. AI just supercharged the process of mimicking complex features.

The pressure this creates will extend far beyond creative software. Any vendor whose strongest defence is an expensive pile of code is already rethinking its future. The winners will be companies that understand customers best, rather than those who hire the most programmers or have the longest list of features on their website.

Adobe’s survival is not the interesting question. Its ability to keep charging a premium for capabilities that others can increasingly reproduce is. Thomas embarked on recreating the Adobe suite due to frustration over cancellation fees the company attempted to charge him when he wanted to stop his subscription.

Since software makers swapped charging one-off payments for a shrink-wrapped box of software to monthly subscriptions for cloud-based services, we’ve paid through the nose for the privilege of using their products. The subscription bill has just become harder to justify.

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