Stop Paying for SaaS: The Ultimate Open Source "Free Stack" 💸

#webdev #showdev #productivity #opensource

As developers (and especially as students), we often fall into the trap of signing up for a dozen "free tier" SaaS products.

Notion for notes.
Jira for tasks.
Vercel for hosting.
Slack for chat.

It works great... until you hit a paywall, or they change their pricing, or you realize you don't actually own any of your data.

I decided to fix this.

Over the last few weeks, I curated a massive list of Open Source alternatives to the most popular SaaS tools. These are tools you can self-host, run locally, or use for free without giving away your privacy.

I call it The Free Stack.

Here are 5 of my favorite discoveries from the list:

1. AppFlowy (Notion Alternative)

If you love Notion but hate that it's cloud-only, check out AppFlowy. It's built with Rust and Flutter, meaning it's blazingly fast. You have 100% control over your data.

2. Coolify (Vercel/Heroku Alternative)

This is a game changer. Coolify is an all-in-one PaaS that helps you self-host your own applications, databases, and services. It connects to your GitHub and deploys automatically.

3. Penpot (Figma Alternative)

Designers, rejoice. Penpot is the first open-source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. It is SVG-based and works right in the browser.

4. Supabase (Firebase Alternative)

You probably know this one, but it deserves the hype. Supabase gives you a Postgres database, Authentication, instant APIs, and Realtime subscriptions.

5. Typebot (Typeform Alternative)

Stop paying huge monthly fees just to have a conversational form on your site. Typebot is a visual conversational form builder that you can host yourself.