Free AI-built rebuilds of Adobe's apps:what's legal, and which SaaS is still worth paying for

A developer is rebuilding Adobe's apps as free, open-source software with AI, and I think that's great news for anyone who pays for software. Copyright mostly doesn't protect how an app works, and the software that sells more than screens isn't going anywhere.

A developer tired of Adobe's cancellation fee

Brandon Thomas made his first commit on September 30, using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5. He told Ars Technica he has about a decade of experience on large projects in Rust, a programming language. Two days later he explained on Hacker News, a forum for programmers, that he was rebuilding Adobe's whole creative suite because he "got bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times."

Within two days he'd started open-source versions of seven Adobe apps, like PhotoCraft for Photoshop and PdfCraft for Acrobat. You can download them free from ArtCraft's apps page or GitHub, and the MIT and Apache licenses let anyone change them.

For its first five days, six people worked on PhotoCraft. Then it reached the front page of Hacker News on October 4, and Ars Technica wrote about it on October 7. By Sunday night more than 200 people had contributed, and the list of apps had grown to twelve, with versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pro Tools and AutoCAD.

It's rough, though. By his own account the apps are early alpha, and PhotoCraft rates itself about 45 percent ready for real work.

The fee that set him off has a history. Adobe announced in 2013 that it would stop making boxed versions and move everyone onto subscriptions, at $49.99 a month for the full suite. Today that plan is called Creative Cloud Pro, it includes AI features, and it costs $69.99 a month on an annual plan. In 2024 the US government sued Adobe, alleging it hid an early-cancellation fee and made people jump through hoops to leave. Adobe agreed in March to settle for $150 million, half of it as free services, without admitting the allegations. The fee is still there: under Adobe's subscription terms, cancel an annual plan you pay monthly after 14 days and you owe half of what's left.

Free versions make leaving easier, and a company can't release a creative product once, rest on its laurels and collect the money.

I checked. It's half right.

I'm not a lawyer, so treat this section as a map.

Thomas calls the apps clean-room rebuilds, which copy what software does without copying its code. In 1984 Phoenix Technologies had one team write down what IBM's PC startup code did. A second team, who had never seen IBM's code, built from that description alone, so Phoenix could show its code had no path back to IBM's.

My instinct was that you can copy an app's exact look and functions if you don't use its code. The functions half mostly holds up. US copyright law says outright that it doesn't cover ideas, procedures or methods of operation, and in 1995 a federal appeals court let Borland copy the menu commands of Lotus's spreadsheet. Not every court agrees, so treat it as the usual rule.

The look half is where I was wrong. In 1994 a federal appeals court said screens like Apple's get only thin protection, but thin protection still covers a copy that's virtually identical. An app's overall look can also count as trade dress, a kind of trademark, and Ars Technica raised that risk for these apps. Icons, artwork, names and logos are protected too.

Two more things a clean room doesn't cover. Patents protect an invention however it was built, so building it yourself is no defense. And Adobe's terms of use ban reverse engineering its software, which they define to include watching what goes into and out of an app in order to recreate it. In 2003 a federal appeals court enforced a software license with a ban like that. Terms like these bind whoever accepted them.

ArtCraft says it works from Adobe's published specifications and from watching how the apps behave, never from Adobe's code. Whether these terms apply to it depends on who agreed to them. I'm not claiming they do; only a court could settle that. If you want to build one yourself, work only from published file formats, standards and documentation, write down what the app should do before anyone writes code, and give it your own name, icons and look.

The menus and tools feel nearly identical

On Sunday I had my AI agent build PhotoCraft and PdfCraft on my Mac. The menus and tools feel nearly identical to the real apps. The results aren't there yet.

If you only use Photoshop or Acrobat for everyday edits, try the free version on copies of your files first. PhotoCraft's own roadmap says Photoshop can't yet reliably open the files it saves, so if you trade files with people who use Photoshop, wait. If it handles your work, cancel, and if you're on an annual plan, time it for the end of your contract year, when the fee is smallest. If design is your job, keep paying until it handles a real project.

Some say SaaS is dead. I don't think so.

Nate B Jones, whose AI newsletter I pay for, wrote about a sell-off in software stocks in February. He argued that what's breaking is pricing per person, when AI agents can now do much of that work themselves. What survives is what you can't copy: data only the vendor has, and a company on the hook when things break. In April he named five things AI can't replace: trust, context, distribution, taste and liability.

That same post counted Adobe's creative tools among the deep moats, and so far Adobe's numbers agree: its creative and marketing subscriptions brought in $16.3 billion last fiscal year, up 11 percent. A free Photoshop doesn't replace the AI tools and cloud services in the plan.

Here are the kinds of SaaS I'd still pay for. Software that holds data you can't copy, like decades of court records or ten years of your own customer history. Software where someone is accountable when it goes wrong, like payroll and tax filing. Software that runs servers you'd rather not run; even my own screen recorder uses Cloudflare for its share links. And software that connects you to other people, like marketplaces, where the network is the product.

Rebuilding the screens gets you none of those. At your next renewal, ask which of those four a vendor is selling you. If the answer is none, that's the one to replace.

For developers, this is a four-minute mile

For almost nine years nobody ran a mile faster than 4:01.4. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran 3:59.4, and 46 days later John Landy beat his time. Within two and a half years, ten men had broken four minutes. The running coach Steve Magness argues that World War II stalled the record. Either way, after 1954 nobody could tell a runner it couldn't be done.

Free photo editors aren't new. GIMP has been around since the 1990s, and in 2013 one developer released Photopea, a browser editor that works a lot like Photoshop. What's new is the speed: seven apps started in two days, and about three in four of PhotoCraft's 200-plus contributors had AI help. I expect a lot more open-source versions of paid apps now that it's this cheap to start one and this easy to help.

I'd started one of my own the day before I heard about PhotoCraft. On Saturday evening I needed to record myself talking on camera over my screen. QuickTime only seemed to capture one or the other, and Loom's free plan doesn't let you download your videos. My AI agents found nine open-source recorders to start from.

Three use copyleft licenses, which can require anything built from their code to carry the same license. For those three I set up a clean room: agents wrote notes on what each did well, and the sessions that built my app worked from the notes and never opened their code. A script checked the notes against all three for any run of twelve words they shared, and found none. Code from the other six was reused only where the license allowed it.

The result is Rushes, my own version of Loom for the Mac. By Sunday afternoon it was making recordings. The screen, camera, microphone and computer audio each save as a separate file on one clock, so they drop straight into my video editor. I can edit by deleting words from the transcript, and the transcription runs on my Mac. It's built to make share links with captions, which I'm still testing. I'll be releasing it as open source shortly.

Next time a subscription renews, check whether someone has built a free version, and test it on copies of your files. If nobody has, you might be the one.

Which subscription would you cancel first if a free version showed up tomorrow?