A developer who used AI to recreate Adobe’s Creative Cloud for free has now set his sights on Microsoft Office — and the result may shift how people think about paid productivity suites.
Brandon Thomas, the engineer behind the ArtCraft project, has published open-source clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint on GitHub under the names WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. Built with Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 5.5) and written in Rust, these apps run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD — and can also run in a browser. They’re released under permissive MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, meaning anyone can read, modify and even reuse the code commercially.
What’s in the builds
- WordCraft: Reads and writes .docx and implements about 88% of Word’s ribbon features (track changes, footnotes, citations, mail merge among them). The team estimates combined file fidelity and stability put it roughly 60% of the way toward replacing Word for real work; the project is still in alpha. A hands-on try found it compact (~91 MB), snappy and visually very similar to Word.
- GridCraft: An Excel analogue that already supports 513 out of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions and about 89% of ribbon commands. Developers rate it roughly 50% ready for production use; compatibility with complex real-world .xlsx files is next.
- DeckCraft: A PowerPoint alternative that covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s features and 93% of core features. It opens/saves .pptx files, runs transitions and animations and can export to PDF, though it hasn’t reached its first alpha release yet.
Each UI button can also be invoked as a command by an AI agent through MCP (Model Context Protocol), Anthropic’s standard for letting models act beyond single prompts. Practically that means a user could ask Claude to build a chart, reformat a report or perform multi-step edits without touching the mouse.
How it was built — and why it matters
Thomas describes the project as a clean-room rebuild: the apps were created from public file-format specifications and observations of how Microsoft Office behaves, not by copying Microsoft’s code — a legal approach reminiscent of how Compaq cloned IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s. The combination of open-source licensing, native offline execution and AI integration makes these builds a direct challenge to Microsoft’s $99.99/year Microsoft 365 Personal and $129.99 family subscription model.
Context and caveats
Free Office alternatives are not new — OpenOffice and LibreOffice have existed for decades — but those projects were community efforts that took years. Thomas shipped his Office trio only weeks after releasing ArtCraft (free Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere/Lightroom equivalents), and his rapid pace leans heavily on modern AI tooling. That speed is eye-catching: WordCraft had more than 12,000 GitHub stars as of Wednesday.
Still, the apps are works in progress. Roadmap items for WordCraft include more testing against real-world .docx files, better chart and SmartArt fidelity, improved page layout, a stability sweep and native printing. Thomas has a history of optimistic timelines (he already backtracked on promising to match Adobe’s feature set within a month), and the teams rate the apps at varying readiness levels rather than claiming parity with Microsoft.
AI costs and capability
Claude Opus 5.5 — the model powering the builds — launched with a token pricing model: $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 test (which measures an AI agent’s ability to finish complex professional tasks), Opus 5.5 scored 66.4%. That combination of performance and billable token usage is an important commercial variable: the apps can run offline, but AI-driven features that rely on cloud models will incur compute costs.
Why crypto readers should care
- Open-source, offline-native productivity tools shift power away from subscription SaaS models and toward user-run software — a theme familiar to decentralization advocates.
- Permissive licensing (MIT/Apache) enables forks, integrations and commercial derivatives, just as open protocols enable new ecosystems in crypto.
- The use of an external model with per-token pricing highlights a recurring theme in AI economics: ongoing compute costs versus one-time download/installation.
- The clean-room legal approach and historical BIOS precedent may inform future disputes between incumbents and fast-moving open-source AI projects.
Bottom line
WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are ambitious, fast-moving experiments that already handle many Office features and file formats — but they’re not turnkey replacements yet. For users who prize privacy, offline capability or zero subscription fees, they’re compelling. For enterprises with complex documents and mission-critical workflows, Microsoft 365 still holds the edge for now. Either way, the project is another reminder that open-source + AI can rapidly reshape long-standing software markets.
Brandon Thomas, the engineer behind the ArtCraft project, has published open-source clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint on GitHub under the names WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. Built with Anthropic’s Claude (Opus 5.5) and written in Rust, these apps run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD — and can also run in a browser. They’re released under permissive MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, meaning anyone can read, modify and even reuse the code commercially.
What’s in the builds
- WordCraft: Reads and writes .docx and implements about 88% of Word’s ribbon features (track changes, footnotes, citations, mail merge among them). The team estimates combined file fidelity and stability put it roughly 60% of the way toward replacing Word for real work; the project is still in alpha. A hands-on try found it compact (~91 MB), snappy and visually very similar to Word.
- GridCraft: An Excel analogue that already supports 513 out of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions and about 89% of ribbon commands. Developers rate it roughly 50% ready for production use; compatibility with complex real-world .xlsx files is next.
- DeckCraft: A PowerPoint alternative that covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s features and 93% of core features. It opens/saves .pptx files, runs transitions and animations and can export to PDF, though it hasn’t reached its first alpha release yet.
Each UI button can also be invoked as a command by an AI agent through MCP (Model Context Protocol), Anthropic’s standard for letting models act beyond single prompts. Practically that means a user could ask Claude to build a chart, reformat a report or perform multi-step edits without touching the mouse.
How it was built — and why it matters
Thomas describes the project as a clean-room rebuild: the apps were created from public file-format specifications and observations of how Microsoft Office behaves, not by copying Microsoft’s code — a legal approach reminiscent of how Compaq cloned IBM’s PC BIOS in the 1980s. The combination of open-source licensing, native offline execution and AI integration makes these builds a direct challenge to Microsoft’s $99.99/year Microsoft 365 Personal and $129.99 family subscription model.
Context and caveats
Free Office alternatives are not new — OpenOffice and LibreOffice have existed for decades — but those projects were community efforts that took years. Thomas shipped his Office trio only weeks after releasing ArtCraft (free Photoshop/Illustrator/Premiere/Lightroom equivalents), and his rapid pace leans heavily on modern AI tooling. That speed is eye-catching: WordCraft had more than 12,000 GitHub stars as of Wednesday.
Still, the apps are works in progress. Roadmap items for WordCraft include more testing against real-world .docx files, better chart and SmartArt fidelity, improved page layout, a stability sweep and native printing. Thomas has a history of optimistic timelines (he already backtracked on promising to match Adobe’s feature set within a month), and the teams rate the apps at varying readiness levels rather than claiming parity with Microsoft.
AI costs and capability
Claude Opus 5.5 — the model powering the builds — launched with a token pricing model: $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 test (which measures an AI agent’s ability to finish complex professional tasks), Opus 5.5 scored 66.4%. That combination of performance and billable token usage is an important commercial variable: the apps can run offline, but AI-driven features that rely on cloud models will incur compute costs.
Why crypto readers should care
- Open-source, offline-native productivity tools shift power away from subscription SaaS models and toward user-run software — a theme familiar to decentralization advocates.
- Permissive licensing (MIT/Apache) enables forks, integrations and commercial derivatives, just as open protocols enable new ecosystems in crypto.
- The use of an external model with per-token pricing highlights a recurring theme in AI economics: ongoing compute costs versus one-time download/installation.
- The clean-room legal approach and historical BIOS precedent may inform future disputes between incumbents and fast-moving open-source AI projects.
Bottom line
WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft are ambitious, fast-moving experiments that already handle many Office features and file formats — but they’re not turnkey replacements yet. For users who prize privacy, offline capability or zero subscription fees, they’re compelling. For enterprises with complex documents and mission-critical workflows, Microsoft 365 still holds the edge for now. Either way, the project is another reminder that open-source + AI can rapidly reshape long-standing software markets.