WordCraft may cut your Office bill with free AI tools

The apps come from Brandon Thomas, a software engineer and founder of a studio called ArtCraft. Earlier in October he released seven free, open-source apps modeled on Adobe’s Creative Cloud, with names like PhotoCraft, VectorCraft and FilmCraft. He has said that project grew out of frustration with Adobe’s cancellation fees, which can reach half of the year’s remaining balance.

Less than two weeks later, he followed up with the Office trio. All of them were written in Rust, a programming language, using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 AI model. They are free to download under the MIT or Apache 2.0 open-source licenses, which means anyone can use, change and share the code.

ArtCraft calls them “clean-room reimplementations.” That means they were built from public file specifications and by watching how the original programs behave, without copying Microsoft’s code.

WordCraft is the most developed of the three. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD from one codebase, and there is a browser version too. It reads and writes .docx, Word’s own format, plus formats such as .odt, .rtf and plain text, and it can import old .doc files.

It looks almost exactly like Word, with the same ribbon toolbar, styles, tables, track changes and references. It even does mail merge, the feature that fills personalized letters from a contact list or spreadsheet. Spelling, grammar and many key features work offline, and you can export PDFs with real, selectable text. There’s a dark mode as well.

GridCraft is the Excel copy. It uses .xlsx as its main format, and its developer claims it already covers 89% of Excel’s ribbon and menu commands and about 98% of its worksheet functions. AI agents can drive it with scripts.

DeckCraft handles PowerPoint’s .pptx files and exports to PDF. Its project page claims 79% feature parity across 191 PowerPoint features.

Here’s the catch. All three apps are labeled alpha, the earliest public testing stage. By the project’s own rating, GridCraft is about 50% “ready for real work” and DeckCraft about 55%.

Even WordCraft, the furthest along, is rated at around 62% of real feature parity with Word, despite covering most of Word’s ribbon commands. Its roadmap says testing against real-world .docx files hasn’t started yet, and charts, SmartArt and embedded objects get dropped when you open a document. That last part matters: a file that looks fine in Word could lose pieces.

The timeline has slipped, too. Thomas first claimed full parity within a month, then said getting close would take months rather than years. Development is moving fast, though. WordCraft’s first version came out on October 8, and it went through several updates in its first week.

Early reviews are mixed. One reviewer liked WordCraft enough to make it his everyday word processor, but still noted typing lag and open questions about security. Others have advised keeping it away from important work for now.

The apps have stirred controversy online, and posts about them were removed from some Reddit communities over worries about AI-written code and security.

There’s also the question of who keeps the lights on. Thomas is largely running the project himself, although he has invited others to contribute. Experts who study open-source software warn that maintaining code takes steady work, and a project built in weeks can lose momentum just as quickly. If a contract won’t open on deadline morning, there’s no support desk to call.

Legal risk is the other unknown. One technology lawyer said clean-room builders could argue their work doesn’t infringe, but that disputes like this may well end up in court when a wealthy company feels harmed.

Thomas is openly pro-AI, which some critics dislike. His Reddit username is “ai_art_is_art,” and ArtCraft itself is a for-profit set of AI art tools. Supporters see the free apps as a protest against subscription tactics that make plans hard to cancel.

For now, keep paying for Office if you depend on it for work, school or anything with a deadline. These apps are early, and losing charts or formatting in an important file is a real risk.

If you’re curious and only need basic documents, WordCraft is worth a try on files you have backed up. Test how your own documents look before trusting it. Students and casual users are the people most likely to benefit if the apps mature.

The bigger signal is speed. A believable rival to Office was once a job for big teams working over several years. Here, one developer got a usable alpha out in a couple of weeks. That could put pressure on subscription prices over time, even if nobody swaps out Word on Monday.