Fork You

13 Apps for 0 Dollars

The project is called ArtCraft, and the list of apps reads like an Adobe and Microsoft invoice turned inside out.

Every one of them is written in Rust and published on GitHub under permissive licenses. From what I can tell, the team leaned heavily on AI to get this much built this fast.

Most of that column says "in development," (at the time of writing this article) and I'd normally take that as a reason to relax.

But then I installed LightCraft… and PhotoCraft… and to be honest, as someone who’s been using Lightroom and Photoshop for over a decade and built a whole business around the Adobe line of products, this is good enough to make you sit back in your chair.

I Love This

Let me start with the hand that's probably the easiest to admit.

I've loved open source my entire career. Most of what I build in public lives on GitHub. Preflight is open source, CronWatch is open source, and Runlight will be when it ships. I've even written about running open source and paid versions of the same thing side by side.

I've also been doing my own small version of what ArtCraft did. Over the past year I replaced a pile of subscriptions with tools I built myself, including a Zapier replacement app I built, as well as Scratchpad, my own notes app I now use every day.

So when someone does it at the scale of an entire creative suite, part of me wants to stand up and clap, but…

I'm Scared of This

Here's the hand I'm less proud of.

I sell Lightroom presets and Photoshop actions. Through my photography newsletters, and Contrastly before I sold it, a real chunk of my income for the last decade has come from photographers who edit in Lightroom and Photoshop.

So the first thing I did was open LightCraft, drag in a folder of my own XMP presets, and wait for it to choke.

Holy shit, it didn't.

All my presets imported cleanly and the looks came through the way they do in Lightroom.

That was a super weird moment for me. Some of it was relief, but a lot of it was a cold little voice asking what happens when every piece of software I depend on (or sell into), can be rebuilt by a small team in a matter of weeks or months.

If Lightroom can be cloned, what exactly can't be? I mean, the ArtCraft team even rebuilt Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

And I don't get to play the innocent victim here. I built Hyperfocal, a tool that generates Lightroom presets from plain english. I used AI to make a product that competes with the very thing I've been selling for a decade.

So I already know how this movie goes from the other side of the screen. That doesn't make it more comfortable to watch.

And Honestly, Good

Then the third hand shows up, and it's got its middle finger out.

Adobe spent the last decade turning software you used to buy into rent you can never stop paying. In 2024 the US government sued Adobe over hidden early termination fees and a cancellation process designed to wear people down.

Every single photographers I know has complained about that subscription for years, and they kept paying because there was nowhere else to go.

So a free, open source Lightroom that reads their presets and keeps their files on their own machine? Fork you, Adobe. You had this coming.

I can hold all three of those feelings at once, and I suspect a lot of builders reading this can too.

What Made the Jump

The detail that made me stop panicking is a boring one actually.

My presets made the jump to LightCraft because XMP is a published standard.

Adobe turned it into an ISO standard years ago, so anyone can read it, and hey… a clone can support it on day one!

Photoshop Actions are a different story. PhotoCraft lets you build new actions from scratch, but there's no way to import the ones you already have (at the time of writing this, I’m sure the ArtCraft team will figure this out).

Actions live in a format Adobe never really opened up, and years of people's recorded workflows are stuck on the wrong side of that wall.

Same company and same clone project, with completely different outcomes for the people who built on top.

If anything, my Lightroom presets picked up a free new market. I’m all for that.

Nobody Gives Away 13 Apps

The other thing worth knowing is that ArtCraft has a business.

The same page describes the company as "the open-source studio for controllable AI image and video," and there's a pricing page sitting right next to all those free apps. The 13 apps are the front door, and the paid studio is the house.

That's a super smart play though, and it's the same move I make when DailyPhotoTips gives away a tip a day so people stick around long enough to buy a preset pack or click an affiliate link.

But it tells you where the money moved. When a whole creative suite can be given away as marketing, the code has stopped being the thing people pay for.

Free Like a Puppy

There's an old line in open source circles that free software is free like a puppy. Getting it costs nothing, and owning it costs you every day after that.

I learned this the expensive way. When I replaced my own subscriptions with tools I built, my maintenance went from a few hours every once in a while to a few hours every month. Dependencies need bumping, and things break while I'm not looking.

That's the very important part the "everything can be cloned in a few weeks" crowd tend to skip. Building the clone is the cheap part now, and keeping it alive for five years is where the real bill shows up.

Most photographers will never fork LightCraft. They'll never compile it or file an issue on GitHub. They'll use whatever opens their photos reliably and keeps working after the next macOS or Windows update.

The same goes for almost every product an indie builder sells. What your customers actually pay for is never having to think about the code at all.

Which means a free alternative can exist, be decent, and still leave your business standing, as long as what you sell is the not-thinking-about-it part.

What Doesn't Fork

So what survives a world where anything can be cloned in a few weeks?

From where I sit, the stuff that doesn't fork looks like this:

• Taste. LightCraft can import my presets, but it can't decide what a good look is. People pay for the eye, and the software only carries it.
• Trust and a list. Tens of thousands of photographers open my emails because of a decade of showing up. A repo can't fork that (for now at least).
• The last mile. Supporting every camera's RAW files and keeping a catalog of 80,000 photos fast are the parts that turn an alpha into something a working photographer trusts. That takes a long time, even with AI.
• Someone who answers. When a preset looks wrong on a customer's photo, they email a person. Support doesn't come with the free repo.

None of those are new ideas, and I've made versions of this argument before. What's new is how fast the code underneath has stopped counting.

Fork You, Too

I'll admit there's something freeing about all this.

If my products can be forked, I don't have to pretend the code is the moat. I can open source more of it and put my energy into the parts nobody can clone.

Big companies built their empires on the idea that their software was too hard to recreate (you know the ones: Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and all the other ones). That idea is dying in real time, and I'm not going to mourn it.

What I'm going to do is make sure everything I sell would still be worth paying for the day someone gives the software away for free.

Because that day already came for Lightroom, and my presets came out fine, at least for now.