If one person can clone Photoshop, you can build the tool you actually need
For years, buying software from Adobe, Microsoft and the like meant paying every month, indefinitely, while the price went up. Lately it's been less of a creep and more of a sprint. In 2026 that stopped being the only option.
This month a single developer used AI to ship open-source rebuilds of seven Adobe apps in roughly a week. They join a long list of open-source tools that already do most of what the paid ones do.
The new ones are rough around the edges, and three years ago I'd have doubted they were possible at all. What interests me more than any one app is how cheap it has become to build a believable copy of expensive software.
What's being built
In early October 2026, a developer named Brandon Thomas released ArtCraft. It's a set of open-source rebuilds of seven Adobe programs, including a Photoshop clone called PhotoCraft. On GitHub he calls them clean-room reimplementations, which means they copy the features but contain none of Adobe's code. A week later the project had added DeckCraft and GridCraft, which go after PowerPoint and Excel. Reviewers describe PhotoCraft as glitchy, but a working Photoshop all the same.
None of this came out of nowhere. GIMP, Krita, Inkscape and Scribus have been chipping away at the design tools for years, and LibreOffice and OnlyOffice have been doing the same to Microsoft Office. Studios use Blender in real production now. Godot picked up a lot of developers after Unity's pricing backlash in 2023. ArtCraft just shows how much faster this can move with AI doing the heavy lifting.
Why now
Rebuilding something on the scale of Photoshop used to take a team several years. AI coding tools now handle enough of the grunt work that one capable person can get a rough version running in weeks. That's why this is happening in 2026 and didn't in 2015.
I don't want to overstate it, though. AI takes away a lot of the labour, but you still need someone who knows what they're doing. A week-old clone is rough. PhotoCraft can't open After Effects files, and Windows users have run into basic bugs. Building software is cheaper and faster than it was, but it isn't trivial.
Is this legal?
Mostly, but the boundaries matter. Copyright covers a program's code, assets and branding. It doesn't cover the ideas behind it, its features, its workflows or its file formats. That means you can legally build something that does what Photoshop does, provided you write it yourself and never copy Adobe's code. GIMP, Blender and LibreOffice have worked this way for decades. "Clean-room" is ArtCraft's word for it: reproduce the behaviour without looking at the original source.
You cross the line if you decompile a vendor's program and reuse the output, because that is copying their code. Cracking a licence or anti-tamper check is a separate offence on top of that. Patents are another risk. Adobe holds thousands of them, and nobody knows yet whether any apply to a project as new as ArtCraft.
This is general information, not legal advice. Australia's Copyright Act has narrow exceptions for interoperability and security testing, and many software licences prohibit reverse engineering in the contract itself, so check the details for your situation.
What this means for a small business
First, "we can't afford to leave" is getting harder to argue. If a free tool covers 90% of what your subscription does, you're paying every year for the last 10%. For some products that's worth it. For a lot of them it isn't.
The second point is more useful. The same drop in cost that produced ArtCraft makes it worth building the specific tool your business is missing. I don't mean a Photoshop clone. I mean the quote-to-invoice step someone still does by hand, the booking system you rent, or the reconciliation everyone puts off. Custom software used to be out of reach for small businesses. Often it isn't any more, and when it's built for you, you own it.
The catch is the part I care most about, given what we do. Anyone can now spin up an automation that leaks an API key, asks for more permissions than it needs, or sends customer data through three services nobody vetted. A half-working tool that leaks data is worse than the subscription you were trying to get rid of. Writing the code was never the hard part. Making sure it won't get you breached is.
What still costs money
Cheaper to build doesn't mean free to run. You'll still pay for support, because something will break at a bad moment and you'll want a person to call. You'll pay for maintenance, because APIs change and browsers update, and software nobody looks after stops working. And you'll pay for security, which is what decides whether a tool helps you or becomes a liability.
That's the honest case for open source and for custom builds. The licence costs nothing, but keeping the thing working and safe does.
“Writing the code was never the hard part. Making sure it won't get you breached is.”The catch
Where this is heading
For about twenty years, good software meant renting it from whoever owned it and accepting their pricing and their roadmap. SaaS vendors effectively decided which problems got solved, and small businesses adjusted their processes to fit whatever was available.
I think that's ending. A custom application, or a workflow that connects the tools you already use in the way you actually work, costs less to build and integrate now than at any point before. Projects that once needed a dev team and a six-figure budget can be scoped, built and secured in weeks. So the useful question for a business owner is what's slowing you down, and whether you still need to put up with it.
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