What Happens When Anyone Can Clone Your Software in a Weekend?
By Creatives Takeover Editorial Team · October 27, 2026
One Developer, Seven Adobe Clones, and a Question Every Software Company Now Faces.
In early October, a post appeared on Hacker News with a three-word title: "Software is over." Its author, a developer named Brandon Thomas, had released seven free apps that copy the look and feel of Adobe's most famous programs, including Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator. He said he had built them with an AI coding tool, and that he planned to match Adobe's features within a month.
The apps are not good enough to replace Adobe, and Thomas himself says so. That is the least interesting part of the story. The interesting part is how cheaply a convincing copy of a major product can now be made, why people were so eager to try one, and what that means for any business that sells software.
What Actually Happened
Thomas is an Atlanta-based software engineer with about 15 years of experience, which makes "vibe coder" an unfair label. He reportedly has written code almost entirely with AI since February. Using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 model and the Rust programming language, he released a project called ArtCraft: seven applications modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. They are free, open source under permissive licenses, and run on Windows, macOS and Linux, a system Adobe has never officially supported.
Reports differ on how long the first versions took, from a single weekend to about a week, and Thomas calls the results a very early alpha. What is not in dispute is the reaction. By October 13, the Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft, had about 55,400 stars on GitHub, the site's way of bookmarking projects people want to follow, and nearly 190 contributors had joined the project. Thomas has since added clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and has started on an AutoCAD lookalike. His promise of full feature parity within a month has been stretched to months. The project is also no longer just one person. As of October 10 its code history listed more than 1,300 changes from about 190 contributors, and a review of the repository found that much of the rest came from Thomas, outside volunteers and other AI models. A crowd and a set of AI tools are now building on what one developer started.
Is It Any Good?
Honestly, not yet. Reviewers who tried PhotoCraft describe it as glitchy but real. It can open and save Photoshop's PSD files and common formats like JPG and PNG, though it reportedly cannot handle HEIC, the format many phones use. Its downloads are measured in megabytes where Adobe's are measured in gigabytes. Thomas himself told forum readers the apps were not anywhere close to ready, and the project's own instructions say it is not suited to daily professional work.
It also isn't the first free alternative. Canva's Affinity, DaVinci Resolve, Photopea and GIMP already cover much of the same ground at no cost or low cost. What makes ArtCraft different is its ambition and its familiarity. It aims to mirror Adobe's interface, shortcuts and workflow, so someone who has used Photoshop for years can sit down in front of it and feel at home. And it covers a whole suite, built largely by one person in a few days.
The Part That Should Worry Adobe Isn't the Code
Thomas has been open about his motive. He says he had hit Adobe's cancellation fee "one too many times," calling it a dark pattern. That is not a random complaint. In June 2024, the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission sued Adobe over how it handled early termination fees on its popular annual plan paid monthly. In March 2026, Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement, made up of $75 million in civil penalties and $75 million in free services for affected customers. Regulators in the United Kingdom opened a separate investigation into the same issue.
This is the quiet lesson. A clone gets attention only if people want an alternative, and Adobe had given many of them a reason. One report puts the price of Creative Cloud at about $70 a month on an annual plan. When customers feel trapped by a price or a cancellation process, they will cheer for anything that lets them leave. For years the obstacle was the time and skill needed to build a substitute. AI has made that obstacle much smaller, while the resentment stayed exactly where it was. For people in countries where a monthly fee of that size is a heavy expense, a free alternative could matter even more, although nobody has measured that yet.
How a Free Suite Plans to Pay for Itself
The apps are free, but the project is not a charity. Thomas has said ArtCraft plans to pay for the work through token-based access to its own visual AI tools, which sit inside the apps. In other words, the free editing software is the doorway, and the AI features are what customers may eventually pay for.
That model should sound familiar to anyone who has watched software markets. Give away the part that is easy to copy, and charge for the part that costs real money to run. It also hints at how the next wave of challengers may compete with incumbents: not by matching every feature at a lower price, but by changing which part of the product carries the price.
Why Code Stopped Being the Moat
For decades, the main protection for large software companies was that their products were expensive and slow to build. Creating something like Photoshop took thousands of engineer years. Even a rival with plenty of money needed a long time to catch up, and by then the incumbent had moved on.
AI coding tools are shrinking that gap. Thomas has predicted that developers will soon be able to produce "1:1 functional equivalents" of popular paid software that run well on any platform. He may be wrong about how soon, but the direction matters. If the cost of writing the first version of a product falls toward zero, the advantage of already having written it falls too.
Investors have been thinking about this all year. In early February, a new set of AI business tools from Anthropic triggered a sharp selloff in software stocks, which traders nicknamed the "SaaSpocalypse." By one estimate, hundreds of billions of dollars of value disappeared in a single day. The central fear was what analysts call seat compression: if AI agents can do the work of several employees, companies will need fewer paid licenses.
Adobe sits in the middle of this. Its stock is down about 25 percent this year even though it posted record third quarter revenue of $6.76 billion, up nearly 13 percent, and has beaten earnings expectations five quarters in a row. It trades at around 15 times earnings, a low figure for a company that long commanded a premium. Its CEO has announced a planned transition. One report says HSBC cut its rating on Adobe from Buy to Hold on October 13, citing competition from ArtCraft. The market is not reacting to a clone that works. It is pricing the possibility that clones will soon be easy.
What Adobe Still Has That a Week Can't Copy
It would be a mistake to write Adobe off. Several things that make it valuable do not come from code alone.
The first is compatibility. Adobe's formats, especially PSD and PDF, are woven into decades of files and into the workflows of agencies, printers, publishers and companies around the world. Opening a file is easy. Opening every file, with every effect, font and layer behaving exactly as it did, is hard, and a single failure can cost a professional a client.
The second is the ecosystem. Plug-ins, templates, training courses, stock libraries, integrations with other tools and a generation of professionals trained on Adobe's software all make switching slow, even if a free alternative arrives.
The third is trust and support. Big organizations pay for guarantees, security reviews, legal protection and a company to call when something breaks. A volunteer project cannot offer that yet.
Software developers have an old saying that the first ninety percent of a project takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. One legal commentator used it to describe ArtCraft: the impressive demo is done, and the long, unglamorous finish is what remains.
The Legal Fog
Thomas describes the apps as "clean-room" reimplementations, meaning they were built from public information about how Adobe's software behaves, without copying its code or assets. The method has a long history, going back to the early 1980s, when engineers rebuilt IBM-compatible computer firmware without infringing its copyright. The idea is that if one team describes what the software does and a separate team writes new code from that description, the result is independent.
Nobody has audited whether ArtCraft followed that process. Legal commentators note that it is unclear how separate the steps were, especially if the same developer observes the product, writes the description and prompts the AI to write the code. Adobe's terms of use, in force since October 2025, also forbid recreating its products, and the company holds many patents. Trademarks and the look of the interface could raise further questions.
Adobe has said nothing publicly, and as of mid-October no takedown notice or lawsuit had been reported. A solo developer would struggle to afford a long legal fight, and some commentators think a case could become a test of how clean-room rules work in the age of AI. This is not legal advice, and the questions are unsettled.
Why "Software Is Over" Is the Wrong Lesson
Thomas's own slogan has already been softened. The more accurate reading is that software is not over, but where its value sits is moving.
When building a product is cheap, the scarce things become everything around it: being trusted, being easy to find, working with the other tools customers use, keeping files safe, answering when something breaks, and treating customers fairly. This is the same pattern we saw in our article on Higgsfield, the AI video company that wins by using other labs' models. Producing the underlying technology is getting easier, so the advantage shifts to the people who put it to work and keep customers confident.
The shift cuts both ways. The same tools that let one developer copy Adobe let Adobe's own engineers move faster. And they let a small company build a serious alternative to an expensive incumbent, which is why every business that charges for software should be paying attention.
What a Business Can Do Now
Start by asking what a good copy of your product would still be missing. Be specific: files, integrations, support, security, reputation. Those are your real defenses, and they deserve more investment than features that a clone can mimic.
Then look at what your customers resent. Hidden fees, difficult cancellations and confusing plans are what turn a weak alternative into a popular one. Fixing them costs little compared with the goodwill they protect.
Move quickly on things that compound over time, such as community, integrations, data and customer relationships. And take open-source and low-cost entrants seriously early, before their quality catches up with their reputation.
If you are small, remember the same shift works for you. A well-aimed alternative to an expensive tool has never been cheaper to build, as long as you are willing to do the boring last stretch properly.
The next move belongs to Adobe. A lawsuit, a price change or silence will each send a message to every other software company whose product could be cloned. Thomas has already started on Office and AutoCAD lookalikes, so the question of what companies do when it happens to them is no longer hypothetical.