How AI apps are offering free substitutes for Big Tech software

As AI development rapidly expands, people are replicating paid-for desktop and mobile apps with free apps, potentially changing the future of legacy software.

Last week, a Reddit user named Brandon Thomas shared a project called “ArtCraft” – essentially a free rebuild of the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes programmes such as Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated services have been named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft.

This software package usually costs individuals $779.99 per year if paid upfront or $69.99 per month on an annual contract.

Earlier this week, ArtCraft also released copies of the Microsoft Office suite.

As with the Adobe package, ArtCraft has announced WordCraft, DeckCraft, and GridCraft, taking on Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. While the software engineer behind the new packages is based in the United States, the programmes are available worldwide.

Here’s what we know:

Who is Brandon Thomas and what did he do?

Reddit user “u/ai_art_is_art”, the person behind ArtCraft, has been revealed as Atlanta, US-based software engineer Brandon Thomas.

Using AI platform Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust software, Thomas said he was able to reverse engineer Adobe’s creative suite.

Announcing his project on Reddit, Thomas said that this is not a “one-off flash in the pan that will die”.

“I’m not just some casual vibe coder. I’m a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I’ve used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects,” he said.

“Six-nines payment rails” refers to online payment infrastructure which provides 99.9999 percent operational availability, while Rust is a programming language.

Thomas said he had become fed up with being hit with cancellation fees on software products and wanted others to be able to access them for free.

He wrote on the social media and news site, Hacker News: “We’ll replace Google Search, we’ll build our own smartphones, we’ll build better infra. We’ll remove all the ads and de-enshi**ify the entire tech world.”

What is ‘vibe coding’ and how common is it for app development?

While Thomas denies he is “just some vibe coder”, vibe coding is at least partly what he has done.

Vibe coding is a new term in software development which refers to prompting AI tools to generate code rather than writing it manually. This means that people who do not have technical knowledge of programming can describe an idea to an AI tool and have it create it for them.

According to the IBM technology company, vibe coding is a “shift toward intent-driven software development, where AI systems assist developers by generating code from natural language instructions”.

The phrase was introduced by computer scientist and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, who wrote on X that AI users could “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”.

Vibe coding has become more common as AI has taken off and new apps have flooded Apple’s App Store.

The New York Times reported that Sensor Tower, a global market intelligence and digital analytics platform, estimates that new apps doubled in the first half of this year to about 560,000.

Are there copyright concerns?

There is a legal grey area around replicating software which has already been established without infringing on intellectual property.

On Reddit, Thomas described his Adobe-similar apps as “clean-room” replacements, meaning that they were built from scratch from publicly available file-format specifications, rather than from Adobe’s proprietary source code.

However, there is still little information about how much of the code Claude wrote and how much Thomas wrote, according to Technollama, a blog written by Professor Andres Guadamuz, a reader in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex.

“We also do not know whether the claimed ‘clean-room process’ stands up to scrutiny,” he said.

Could AI coding kill legacy software?

Possibly.

The downfall of legacy software is unlikely to make apps like Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft completely obsolete, but it could make them far less profitable if there are free-to-use substitutes available.