The Developer Behind Free Adobe Clones Has Also Released Early Copies of Word, Excel and PowerPoint
by Jerome London · Thought CatalogUpdated 11 minutes ago, October 11, 2026
Brandon Thomas is offering free, open-source copies of software people pay Adobe and Microsoft to use. The former Square engineer and Storyteller.ai CEO has released alpha versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which he’s calling WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft.
They follow his first project, ArtCraft: apps that copy Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. All of it runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and he built it in Rust with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5.
His reason, posted to Hacker News: “I got bit by the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.” Charges for ending subscriptions early were also at the center of a Justice Department case: Adobe agreed in March 2026 to pay $150 million to settle allegations that it hid early-termination fees. Adobe denied wrongdoing.
The Photoshop clone’s first code is dated Sept. 30, 2026. Thomas initially promised full parity within a month, then walked it back: “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.”
Testers aren’t convinced yet. Gizmodo described it as feeling “like using glitchy, but real, Photoshop.”
Whether any of it holds up legally is an open question. Lawyer Neil Brown said reimplementers “may well argue” their work is non-infringing. That’s a potential legal defense, and the question of whether these clones infringe remains unresolved.
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