Wow: Developer builds seven free Adobe alternatives with Claude Opus 5.5

What's new

Software developer Brandon Thomas has released seven free alternatives to Adobe's creative programs under the name Artcraft. He says he used Anthropic's AI model Claude Opus 5.5 to build them. The programs mimic what you know from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro.

Thomas calls them "clean room" replacements. That means they are written from scratch without copying Adobe's code. They are made in the Rust programming language, and there are also versions that run directly in a web browser (via WebAssembly). The code is open and released under MIT and Apache licenses, so anyone may use and modify it.

Important: Thomas himself calls the projects "super early alpha." These are very early versions. Users have pointed to missing features and bugs, so they are far from being able to replace Adobe today.

What's clever

The interesting thing is not just the programs, but the way they were made. A single developer, with help from an AI model, has tackled seven large programs at once. That used to be something large teams spent many years on.

It shows how far AI help for programming has come. At the same time, you can run them in the browser without installing anything. Thomas has since tempered his own expectations: he says it will take longer to reach 99 percent of Adobe's features, but that it can be measured in months rather than years.

Cheaper or better?

Cheaper yes, better no, at least not yet. The programs are free to download. By comparison, Adobe's subscriptions typically cost several hundred kroner a month, but an exact price for Denmark is not stated in the sources I have used.

The project is to be funded by people paying for access to Artcraft's existing AI tools for images and video. They sit inside the programs alongside models from other companies. So the programs themselves are free, but the AI part may cost money. Prices for it are not stated in the material I have found.

About the model itself: Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22. According to the coverage, it costs 4 dollars per million tokens (pieces of text) for input and 20 dollars for output, down from 5 and 25 dollars. Anthropic says it is about 40 percent cheaper to run than its predecessor Opus 5 and generates answers 30 percent faster. That makes it cheaper to build large projects like this one.

What it's good for

Today, Artcraft is mostly for the curious, developers and people who want to experiment. For regular work with images, layout and video, Adobe or established free programs such as GIMP, Inkscape and DaVinci Resolve are still the safe choice.

In the long run, the project could become a free alternative for individuals and small businesses if it gets there. That requires the bugs to be fixed and the features to grow. So it is a story to keep an eye on more than a tool to switch to now.

You can check out Artcraft here: https://getartcraft.com/apps.

We at Promptly are ourselves busy playing with, among other things, FilmCraft, which is an open source version of Premiere that can even be "remote controlled" by your AI via a so-called MCP connection. We dive into that on our AI courses on visual AI production and on mobile video, where we edit with AI, among other things.