About ModelSignal
How we check.
ModelSignal is an independent tech discovery publication. We find free alternatives, useful repositories, published experiments and real build costs — and we show the working.
Prices come from the vendor’s own page.
Every paid price is read off the vendor’s pricing page, rendered in a real browser, taking the cheapest paid tier in US dollars. Each one carries the page and the day it was read — prices change, so check before you buy. Where the page did not print the price word for word, we say so.
Computed numbers say they’re computed.
Yearly costs and totals are worked out from the monthly prices (monthly × 12) and are labelled that way, so a number we calculated can’t be mistaken for one a vendor published.
Free means free of licence, not free of cost.
The free tools are self-hosted: a server and your time are still yours to pay. We only call a tool “open source” when its repository declares an OSI-approved licence; a custom licence is shown as custom. Stars, contributors and last commit come from GitHub on the day shown.
A pairing is ours unless the maintainers say it.
When a free tool doesn’t describe itself as an alternative to the paid one, its entry says so. Each description is the maintainers’ own words, quoted.
We don’t run the experiments we cover.
Actually Tested and Real Build Cost posts are built from published studies, benchmarks and bills. We read them, check every number against the source, quote it, list the catches, and link the original with the day we read it. Nothing in those posts was measured by us.
No gates.
Every post’s full list, links and sources are on this site — no comments, no DMs, no sign-up.