How many people at your company pay for a Photoshop or Office license to use 10% of what it offers? That question stuck with me this week, and the news behind it comes with an in-house opinion.
According to Tom's Hardware (by Jhet Borja, October 11, 2026), Brandon Thomas, an engineer with 15 years of experience and creator of ArtCraft (a free, open-source suite that replicates Adobe's apps), announced three new tools: GridCraft, DeckCraft and WordCraft. Their goal is to replace Excel, PowerPoint and Word.
Key points from the article:
Criticism of "vibecoded" and "AI slop" followed. Thomas replies that he does know how to code.
This is the part we care about most. Pablo, from the SGD team, is a publicist by training, used Photoshop for a long time and makes art (hand illustrations he animates in After Effects and then brings to the web, plus logos; some of that work lives on his personal blog, garitma.com). He downloaded PhotoCraft, ArtCraft's Photoshop clone, and put it to work.
The first thing he noticed was the size: about 66 MB, versus the gigabytes Adobe takes up. As he puts it, it is mathematically impossible for it to have every feature.
And yet it got the job done. Pablo needed to retouch the avatars of SGD's agents and move some formats on the Somos Gente logo to create the "Made by" seal now visible at auradesignsystem.com.
Every shortcut worked: cmd+shift+alt+s to save for web, selecting an element and aligning it. In Pablo's words, perfect.
His comparison is the interesting part. He couldn't get that with Affinity, because Affinity aims to be an alternative, but a "better" one. What he needed was an alternative that is the same. Alternatives have always existed, he explains, but not a lightweight one, designed as a family under a single installer, that keeps the same commands for light tasks. Others do the same things but in different places, or they run online and their performance depends on Chrome.
Pablo offers a close-to-home example: his dad uses Word only to write certain official letters. A free alternative would serve him perfectly, but people don't use them because "it's what exists."
His point is simple. Not everyone uses 100% of Adobe or Word. If 66 MB does what you need, why the rest? His read is that audiences will split: professionals who will keep needing the full suite, and light-task users who will prefer something lightweight and familiar.
On the SGD blog we've already written about how AI is making custom software viable. We covered Starbucks building internal software with AI, and Pablo using Cursor to build a home app for about 20 dollars that replaced subscriptions costing around 100 dollars a year.
ArtCraft is another piece of the same puzzle. When building software gets cheaper, the "pay because there's no other option" argument gets weaker.
This isn't about canceling everything tomorrow. It's about paying for what you actually use.
If you want to review which tools your company is paying for, or explore whether custom software makes sense for your operation, at Somos Gente Digital we love that conversation. Write to us and let's look at it together.
PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE
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