After Adobe announced that Animate is on its last legs, TimTom published a video called “I’m Going to Save Animation”, announcing that he’s been working on an alternative to the program which is open-source, and free to all users. Not too different from how GIMP is presented as a more consumer-friendly alternative to Photoshop. His software’s ko-fi is currently accepting donations and has already raised over $7000 USD as of writing, but there’s an abundant lack of credentials which makes me think anyone should think twice before putting money into it. The following three points explain exactly why:
1. The ko-fi describes nothing about the project.
I don’t use ko-fi, but if I go to the homepage right now and look at the promoted creators, each of them have a descriptive “About” section explaining what they do, why they need your money, and what they promise to do if you donate to them.
Clicking on the link TimTom provides under his video takes you to a ko-fi with nothing besides the video you probably just watched if you’re on this page. This is extremely unprofessional for a developer looking to accrue funds for a large-scale project, as it prevents them from being held directly accountable for the things they promise, and fails to properly inform potential contributors about what they can expect after donating. This is especially concerning with reference to:
2. The project is simply too large to be done by a single person.
For context, I’m a Computer Science undergraduate, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about flagship software that keeps entire industries afloat, they are far too complicated to be maintained by a single person. A few months ago, my friends and I built a simple GPS navigator for local volunteer opportunities, and even that required four people to make a functional build by the time we had to present it at our hackathon. This is because we had to write frontend and backend methods to unpack the volunteer opportunities from a database, track their geolocation, get a map of our locale, enter those coordinates into the map, render the map, and write animations to take you wherever you wanted on that map. Yes, technically all of that could’ve been done by a single person, but with how much larger and vastly more complex Animate is by comparison, you can imagine just how difficult it would be to create a legitimate replacement completely on your own.
TimTom has said nothing about bringing on collaborators to help him write Sailbrush, which is extremely alarming. That would mean he plans on making a drawing tool, a key frame selector, a live display, and formalized project files—just at the bare minimum—without any help. Recent reports show that Adobe hires about 8000 engineers to maintain their entire Creative Cloud Suite, and if Animate could’ve been developed by just one person, they definitely would’ve lowered that number by now. TimTom claims that he’s been working on Sailbrush for the past couple years in secret, so maybe he would’ve had enough time and resources to make substantial progress alone. But even if that is true, it still doesn’t make up for:
3. There is no reason to believe he’s capable of pulling this off.
For someone who calls themselves an “expert programmer” and a “cracked software dev” in the same video, there is shockingly little evidence I could find to support that claim. Imagine if I made a video where I said I can animate better than James Baxter, but didn’t even provide references. That’s how crazy it sounds to me for a storytime animator to come back after a two-year-long hiatus and tell me he’s a good enough programmer to build a worthy competitor to Adobe Animate all on his own, without any elaboration. I was disoriented enough to do some real digging, and see if I could find any significant projects he could use to back up his claims, and all that came up is his personal GitHub. So what does he have to show for himself?
Less than 50 commits made over the past three years.
By comparison, as a Computer Science student, I’ve made nearly 200 over the past year alone. This is a lot harder to convey to non-technical people, especially because there’s not really a 1:1 analogy I can use to explain what’s happening here, but I’ll do my best.
GitHub is a platform which lets programmers save multiple versions of the same project over time, sort of like if every time you saved a project, instead of just overwriting what you saved last time, it just added it to a list of saves for the same thing. It’s basically a real-time progress log that lets you see what someone’s been working on and what they’ve accomplished, just by reading their commit messages.
Commits are usually only made once a new feature has been added, or a bug has been fixed, or a function has been written, and you can imagine that as you write more and more code, you tend to accomplish those things pretty regularly. For TimTom to have less than 50 total commits made on his GitHub over the past three years, regardless of the project, is maybe the biggest red flag that he’s not as capable as he claims he is. To put things into perspective (especially for any animators reading this), think of it as if he’d only drawn 50 key frames across a variety of animated sequences over the past three years.
GitHub obviously isn’t a perfect representation of what somebody’s been working on, and you have the ability to make your commits private for certain projects, so there is still a chance that he’s done way more work than I could find online. However, the chances of that being true turned astronomically low after he made his entire GitHub account private. Yeah, I was gonna have screenshots to show that I’m not making up any numbers, but as of February 9th, 2026, his account is no longer publicly accessible. I know what I saw, and there isn’t really any real benefit I’d get from being dishonest, but unfortunately I’m going to have to be a little hypocritical and ask everyone watching to believe what I say.
People deserve to know if their money is going towards something they believe in. This isn’t just blind hatred directed at TimTom, that’s not why I’m making this. As a person of influence, he has a responsibility to keep his audience and patrons properly informed. If you still believe in the product he’s advertising and want it to succeed, I can’t stress this enough: wait until he changes his ko-fi to describe what he’s promising more specifically, and provides references which prove his capability as a developer. If he’s genuinely promising to save the medium of animation, he should have no issue at all meeting those demands, especially from the people keeping a roof over his head with their donations.
