Learn about Open Design: The open-source version lets you get everything Claude Design has to offer for free.

Until a few months ago, the biggest complaint about AI tools was that they were becoming increasingly expensive, and that free packages were no longer sufficient. Since then, people have accepted that paying for these tools is unavoidable and have begun to view them as a business expense.

However, even the more premium packages come with unreasonable limits. Anthropic, as you might imagine, tops the list of companies whose products people want to use the most. Many people are using the Claude Max package, and constantly exceeding their usage limits. Claude Design , which the company launched just a few weeks ago, is particularly data-intensive. The funny thing is, they've used up their weekly limit before they've even had a chance to use up all their data! That's when they started looking for solutions, and luckily, there's an open-source version of Claude Design, which has led many to believe they'll never need to open the original again.

Open Design is built on the same platform as Claude Design.

Open Design is an open-source, locally-preferred alternative to Claude Design. It was released by the nexu-io team under the Apache-2.0 license, meaning you have the right to read, copy, and self-host it.

Before diving into what Open Design does and offers, let's quickly summarize what Claude Design actually is, in case you missed the excitement of its launch. This tool is built on the idea that you precisely describe what you want and receive a complete design product instead of a long paragraph explaining how you can design it yourself. You can also edit the design right there, iterate through it via chat, and export the finished product to PDF, PPTX, Canva, or even transfer it to Claude Code once you've achieved the desired result.

Open Design is built on a similar idea (you describe, it builds, you edit), but instead of running on Anthropic's server and model, it delegates the work to any programming software you have installed, such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, etc. It automatically detects whatever is already on your computer and integrates it into the design process; you don't need to configure much.

Open Design operates on a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) model, meaning you grant yourself access to the AI ​​model that performs the actual work, and you only pay for that use through your account, not a separate subscription fee. However, instead of requiring you to paste an API key, it can also rely on the login credentials of the programming software you're already logged into. So, if you've already authenticated with Claude Code or the Codex on your computer, Open Design will use that existing setup instead of asking you for any additional information.

The developers explained that the whole point was to take the original agent loop that Anthropic provided with Claude Design and remove the user-binding parts. Claude Design became popular upon its release, but it remained closed-source, only available to paying users, only worked in the cloud, and bound users to Anthropic's models. Open Design retained the same loop and artifact-prioritizing approach, only without those bindings.

When it comes to configuration, there are several ways you can run Open Design, depending on how much setup you want to do. You can load a pre-built desktop application, install it directly into your design agent as an MCP server, launch it in Docker, or clone the repository and run from source. While you'll find instructions for each method on the product's GitHub repository, it's possible to choose to run from source and let Claude Code handle all the complexities by instructing it to set things up for you. Remember, even though you let Claude Code set everything up for you, you still have the freedom to choose which agent controls each design session in the interface, meaning you're not tied to Claude Code just because it's installed. The daemon will scan your PATH environment variable and display whatever it finds (Claude Code, Codex, etc.), and you'll choose for each session from there.

Open Design's design system and skills are the reason why you'll no longer remember Claude Design!

The two classes handled all the heavy lifting.

What's special about Open Design is that it's not just built on you giving it a requirement and hoping the result will look good. It relies on two elements working together: design systems and skill. The design system is the layer of "how the image should look"—each system is a unique file describing the brand's colors, typography, spacing, motion, and tone. 150 of these design systems are built into the tool, including familiar names like Linear, Stripe, Vercel, Slack, H&M, Apple, and Figma. Skill is the layer of "what you're actually creating," and over 100 skills are built into the tool. Each skill is essentially a recipe for a specific type of product (landing page, dashboard, mobile app mockup, presentation, etc.).

You can also use your own branding instead of relying on a built-in design system! For example, the author provided Open Design with a MUO website, and it performed exceptionally well. Open Design extracted MUO's entire visual identity into a design system: the signature red accents, typography, spacing, and overall feel of the article. To test its capabilities, the author asked it to convert one of their recent articles into a project presentation using that extracted system. Instead of going through complicated steps, manually adding files, or toggling settings to tell Open Design that they wanted to use MUO's design system, all the author did was tell Open Design they were designing a presentation for MakeUseOf, and it automatically extracted the design system it had just created.

The final presentation it produced was also excellent. MUO's signature red color was used throughout the table of contents, highlighted phrases, and section numbering! The author's name and publication date were placed on the cover page, and the whole thing looked like a well-designed presentation. It even created a separate footer for each slide and arranged the slides containing more technical specifications with enlarged statistics, instead of simply copying text onto a blank background. That 12-slide presentation was the initial result, but it was ready to use without any further manual editing.

However, the author later tried using the editing tools to see how they performed compared to Claude Design. The good news is that Open Design has the same core editing model: You can directly edit elements, select a specific part and edit it individually through the chat window, or make broader changes to the entire product by chatting with it.

It works quite well, and the complaints here are mostly similar to Claude Design, such as changes taking too long to display and sometimes edits not working as intended the first time.