Save $1,620/year. Use these free tools instead.
12 paid tools and a free, self-hostable alternative for each — $135 a month, $1,620 a year between them.
All 12 tools, with prices and links
01CI
Drone
Instead of
Buildkite“Harness Open Source is an end-to-end developer platform with Source Control Management, CI/CD Pipelines, Hosted Developer Environments, and Artifact Registries.”
- Buildkite costs
- $30/user/mo · Pro Plan planPrinted as “$ 30 per active user/month” on their pricing page, read 11 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $360 per userComputed: $30 × 12.
- Drone costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 38.5k stars · 93 contributorsLast commit 11 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 11 Oct 2026.
02Home
Scrypted
Instead of
Canary“Scrypted is a high performance video integration and automation platform”
- Canary costs
- $24.99/mo · Premium planPrinted as “$24.99/mo. for the first” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $300Computed: $24.99 × 12.
- Scrypted costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 6k stars · 108 contributorsLast commit 13 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
03Web
Grav
Instead of
Strikingly“Modern, Crazy Fast, Ridiculously Easy and Amazingly Powerful Flat-File CMS powered by PHP, Markdown, Twig, and Symfony”
- Strikingly costs
- $16/mo · PRO planPrinted as “$16/mo” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $192Computed: $16 × 12.
- Grav costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 15.7k stars · 255 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
04Email sending
Postal
Instead of
Mailgun“A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail”
- Mailgun costs
- $15/mo · Basic planPrinted as “$15/mo” on their pricing page, read 11 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $180Computed: $15 × 12.
- Postal costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 16.9k stars · 53 contributorsLast commit 3 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 11 Oct 2026.
05Creative
ShareX
Instead of
Zight“ShareX is a free and open-source application that enables users to capture or record any area of their screen with a single keystroke. It also supports uploading images, text, and various file types to a wide range of destinations.”
- Zight costs
- $9.95/user/mo · Create plan · billed yearlyPrinted as “$9.95 per user” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $119 per userComputed: $9.95 × 12.
- ShareX costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 40.1k stars · 300 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
- Soundtrap costs
- $9.59/mo · Sound Starter planPrinted as “9 . 59 US$ per month” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $115Computed: $9.59 × 12.
- LMMS costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 10.5k stars · 306 contributorsLast commit 27 Sep 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
07Money
Ghostfolio
Instead of
Sharesight“Open Source Wealth Management Software. Angular + NestJS + Prisma + Nx + TypeScript”
- Sharesight costs
- $7/mo · Starter planPrinted as “$7” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $84Computed: $7 × 12.
- Ghostfolio costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 9.4k stars · 317 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
08Money
GnuCash
Instead of
Quicken Simplifi“GnuCash Double-Entry Accounting Program.”
- Quicken Simplifi costs
- $6.99/mo · Quicken Simplifi planPrinted as “$6.99” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $84Computed: $6.99 × 12.
- GnuCash costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 4.4k stars · 613 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
- Wolfram|Alpha costs
- $5/mo · Pro planPrinted as “$500 per month billed $60.00 annually” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $60Computed: $5 × 12.
- SageMath costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 2.6k stars · 1,646 contributorsLast commit 13 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
10Web
SearXNG
Instead of
Kagi“SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.”
- Kagi costs
- $5/mo · Starter planPrinted as “$5 /mo” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $60Computed: $5 × 12.
- SearXNG costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 38.4k stars · 359 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
11Home
Home Assistant
Instead of
Homey“:house_with_garden: Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.”
- Homey costs
- $2.99/mo · Premium planPrinted as “$ 2.99/mo” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $36Computed: $2.99 × 12.
- Home Assistant costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 91.5k stars · 5,965 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
- Paste costs
- $2.49/mo · Personal planPrinted as “$2.49/month” on their pricing page, read 14 Oct 2026.
- Over a year
- $30Computed: $2.49 × 12.
- Maccy costs
- $0 licence, self-hostedYour server and your time are not free.
- Maintenance
- 21.9k stars · 93 contributorsLast commit 14 Oct 2026, per GitHub on 14 Oct 2026.
Free of licence, not free of cost.
Self-hosting means a server and the time to run it. The free tools here cost $0 to license; the paid prices are the cheapest paid tier in US dollars on the day shown, and they change. “Open source” is only shown where the repository declares an OSI-approved licence.
How these were checked
Every price was read off the vendor's own pricing page, rendered in a real browser on 2026-10-11 and 2026-10-14, taking the cheapest paid tier in US dollars. The page and the date are listed against each one below, so you can check any of them yourself.
Quoted or computed. Each entry shows the price as the page prints it. 12 of 12 appear on the vendor's page word for word. Anything worked out from those figures is labelled computed and shows its arithmetic, so a number we calculated cannot be mistaken for one a vendor published. The only computed figures here are the yearly costs and the totals.
0 of the 12 free tools describe themselves, in their maintainers' own words, as an alternative to the tool they sit beside. The other 12 do not name theirs, so those pairings are not their maintainers' claim, and each one says so. Every description is quoted underneath its tool. Stars, contributors and last commit came from the GitHub API on the same day as the prices.
All 12 free projects had been committed to within the last 90 days.
Self-hosting is not free of cost — it is free of licence. A server and the time to run it are yours to pay either way, and nothing below pretends otherwise.
