I replaced $847/mo in SaaS with open-source alternatives. Here's the stack.
Most indie devs are bleeding money on tools they don't need to pay for. I spent 6 months migrating my entire startup stack to open-source and cut our monthly SaaS bill from $847 to $0.
Here's what I swapped:
Proprietary | Open-Source Alternative | Savings |
|---|---|---|
Firebase | Supabase (self-hosted) | $25/mo |
Figma | Penpot | $15/mo |
Calendly | Cal.com | $12/mo |
Notion | AppFlowy | $10/mo |
Intercom | Chatwoot | $65/mo |
Vercel Analytics | Plausible (self-hosted) | $9/mo |
Airtable | NocoDB | $20/mo |
Zapier | n8n (self-hosted) | $49/mo |
Slack | Rocket.Chat | $42/mo |
The catch? Migration isn't trivial. Each swap took research — understanding license implications, feature parity gaps, hosting requirements, and community health.
That's exactly why I built OpenAlt. It's a platform that does this research for you: AI-powered comparisons, community rankings, migration guides, and a curated database of every viable open-source alternative.
If you're an indie dev or founder trying to keep costs down without sacrificing tooling quality, this is for you.