Brandon Thomas got an Adobe cancellation fee, so he built seven free clones of its apps
Brandon Thomas built seven free Adobe app clones after facing cancellation fees, showing that AI can now replicate familiar interfaces and challenge software reliance.
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief,
A software engineer got hit with one too many Adobe cancellation fees. So he pointed an AI model at Photoshop and rebuilt it. Then he did it six more times, then he started on Microsoft Office. The apps are free, open source, and close enough to the real thing to make you blink. If your team sells software, the ground just moved. Let me catch you up.
The deep cut
- The product copies fast, the business does not. REA can decompile Notion's clipboard, but it cannot decompile the trust Notion earned.
- A cancellation fee can fund a clone army. Brandon Thomas built seven Adobe dupes after Adobe charged him an early termination fee.
- Looking familiar beats being free. GIMP has been free for years; PhotoCraft wins by copying Photoshop's exact menus and shortcuts.
One angry customer, seven free clones
Brandon Thomas, a working software engineer, got bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times. His answer was ArtCraft: seven free apps that copy Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat, built with Claude in Rust. Now he is doing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint too.
His pitch is loud. "Software is over," he wrote on Y Combinator, "I just one-shotted Photoshop." Tom May at Creative Boom hears Napster in that swagger: free copies spread, clones of clones follow, and a business model that looked safe never fully recovers.
Take the bravado with salt. But the point under it is real. Building creative software used to need thousands of paid engineers and years of work. That cost was the wall around Adobe. AI just made the wall cheaper to climb.
Close enough to fool you, not yet close enough to trust
David Nield at Lifehacker actually ran PhotoCraft. Same color scheme, same panel layout, same menus in the same order, same keyboard shortcuts. For cropping, color tweaks, and layer work, he transformed his workflow from the Adobe app pretty much wholesale. Fast, slick, and mostly bug-free.
Then the honest part. He is not canceling his subscription. He does not yet trust his real projects to AI-written code, and he expects cracks once you push past basic tools. Future bug fixes get piled, AI code on top of AI code.
The Office numbers tell the same story. WordCraft claims about 62% real-world feature parity, DeckCraft reports 79% breadth but roughly 55% readiness. Impressive for a solo build. Not yet a replacement your team would ship client work on.
The real target is your switching cost
GIMP and LibreOffice have been free for years and barely dented Adobe or Microsoft. The reason is switching cost. Learn Photoshop for ten years and GIMP feels like a foreign language.
What changed is that these clones copy the familiar layout, not just the function. As KDnuggets puts it, the threat to Adobe and Microsoft is not another free alternative. It is software that looks familiar, does the core job, and gives users no compelling reason to keep paying. Your interface was part of your moat. AI can now mirror it.
What the agent cannot decompile
Here is the steadier read. REA, the reverse-engineering toolkit now sitting at over 130,000 GitHub stars, followed Notion's copy function all the way into its storage format and rebuilt a DX-Ball routine that matched the original across 3,205 test cases. The Danish team at Produktland draws the line that matters: the product is the easy part to rebuild, the business is harder.
The business is customers who trust you, data they have parked with you for years, a price they will pay, and a working path to reach them. None of that lives in the code. An agent cannot decompile it.
Cloudflare's bet points the same way. Buying Deno, the team argued that being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business, not a leak. If your only lock-in is that leaving is hard, AI is about to make leaving easy. Trust and service have to carry the weight instead.
Three questions for your team
- If a competitor cloned our interface this sprint, what would still keep our customers? Name it, or we do not have it.
- Which parts of our product are just a familiar layout, and which are the data and trust that no agent can rebuild?
- Are our cancellation and pricing practices the kind that turn one angry engineer into a free clone of our whole suite?
