Someone got rejected by Adobe and made 7 open-source alternatives to the Adobe Suite 🗿💀
Seven apps. Zero subscriptions. Every line of code sitting wide open on GitHub so you can go check his work yourself. Villain origin story, confirmed or not.
Derek Keene
3 min read
Here’s the story going around: some dev applied to Adobe, got rejected, and instead of posting a sad “resilience” thread on LinkedIn, allegedly built a full open-source replacement for their entire product line. In Rust. Out of spite. That’s not a rejection story, that’s a revenge arc with a GitHub README.
The project’s called ArtCraft, and it shipped native — not Electron, not a Chrome tab in a trenchcoat cosplaying as desktop software — replacements for basically the whole Adobe Creative Suite. No subscription. No Creative Cloud login wall. No “trial expired, pay up to open your own damn file.” Full source sitting wide open at github.com/storytold for anyone to read, fork, or roast.
The lineup
Same job, zero monthly fee. Adobe app on the left, ArtCraft’s replacement on the right — real screenshots below, because “trust me bro” isn’t a software review:
All seven live under the same GitHub org as ArtCraft itself, the flagship AI filmmaking tool this whole suite grew out of. PhotoCraft alone is past 11,000 stars — that’s not a hackathon toy rotting in a bookmarks folder, that’s real people actually running this stuff.
Why it actually matters
Native, not Electron — that’s the difference between a tool that opens instantly and one with main character energy and a RAM problem. Several apps also ship WebAssembly builds for the browser, keep your files processing locally instead of phoning home, and expose CLI/JSON/MCP hooks — meaning a script or an AI agent can actually drive a Photoshop-class tool directly, instead of screen-scraping a UI like a digital pickpocket.
I went looking for proof Adobe actually rejected this guy and found jack shit — not on GitHub, not in the Hacker News threads. The founder (“echelon”) talks about a filmmaking background and a healthy grudge against subscription software, not a rejection letter. Could be true. Could be a myth that got too good to fact-check. Either way: never mess with open-source developers.
Worth using, or just hype?
If you’re tired of Adobe raising your bill to open your own PSD, it’s worth an actual test drive, not a bookmark you’ll never open. Feature parity won’t be 1:1 with a decade of Adobe R&D on day one — that’s just math. But for crop, color, cut, layout, export — the stuff most people actually do — “free and genuinely good” is catching up fast.
I’m running PhotoCraft and FilmCraft against real client work next. If they hold up, there’s an obvious play for Avirasphere clients sick of eating another subscription line item.
Go poke at it yourself before Adobe’s PR team “convinces” them to pivot to a freemium model
P.S. — Adobe, if you’re reading this: this is not a drill. Maybe don’t reject the next one.