Replace ElevenLabs, Jira, Slack & Granola for Your AI Agents (Free on GitHub)

0:00You get yourself an agent and suddenly your LLM costs go up. You need a subscription to get it to do note taking. You need it to scrape the internet, which costs money. You need it to do project All these things start to build up your costs. Well, you know what? I've got seven ways for you to kill your subscriptions for your agent tools, and in many ways you're going to be better, and it's about more than just free. This is about customization. Every one of these tools is open source, so you can use it, customize it, make [music] it your own. Presented by

0:25Zapier, the AI automation company. Starting with Oh, and yeah, time stamps below, but starting with Fluid Voice. You know how Granola is a really good note-taking app for taking for transcribing your meetings, and then what you do is you give those transcripts to your agent, and your agent starts to know you, and it starts to know what you're working on, and a

0:44lot of people use it with their agents. Nothing wrong with Granola, but free users start to lose older notes, which means your notes aren't really yours. You then also can't have the audio recordings of it because all they do is text transcriptions, and if you want more people on your team to have it, the

1:00costs just start to go up and up and up. Well, I've got an alternative. It's called Fluid Voice. I just talked to the creators of this because they added this incredible feature literally this week. Here's the deal. Fluid Voice started as one of these dictation apps that was free and open source, and what you did was you held a key on your keyboard, you talked, and then it dictated it. And what they did that was different from like Whisper Flow and others was everything happened on your device, and so you had privacy and you had speed because the

1:30transcriptions happen on your device. Well, a lot of users of Fluid Voice said, "Well, as long as you're recording my voice, why don't you also record the person who I'm talking with in a meeting, and give me those notes the way that Granola does and the way that other tools do, all on your computer, no

1:43random robot sitting in the meeting?" And so, the Fluid Voice team said, "Let's do it." They did, and that's what they built. It's now called Fluid Meet. It is available for Mac only today, but if you just join the waitlist that I'm going to create with you. Sorry, for them. I will get you access before everyone else to the Windows version. It is that good. I did the same

2:03thing when they did the dictation app. So, here's what happens. The meetings are going to stay on your computer because the transcription happens on your device. You don't have to use bandwidth, which really sucks when you're in a meeting, to use bandwidth to send your recording over to a granola or someone else and then have it come back. It stays on your device. It's fast. It's private and it's open source. Fluid Voice ships with the recording to for meetings on your Mac. Remember, I've got access for you to early access to

2:29Windows. Playback. And I really love that yes, you see the transcript in real time. Whatever the other person saying is in real time. Whatever you're saying is real in real time. But also, you can then get the full recording and the transcript after the meeting. And they've added a way for your agent to get access to all the transcripts.

2:48Again, everything's on your computer. All stays private. Worth noticing again, it's Mac and so you do need a good Mac to make it work. And I will have access to Windows early. This thing is phenomenal. Already 12,000 stars on GitHub and it's worth installing. I have it on my computer and I love it. Let's go on to the next one. Paperclip. This is for project management. It replaces Jira. This is now up to over 100,000 stars. I just saw Dota, the creator, rave about this and it's a huge undertaking because they've taken on Jira. Jira is a hugely popular project tracker. It's built by Atlassian and I

3:25know that you're probably using another one. I don't care which one you're using. It costs you money and you have to deal with the design decisions that they made for it and it's not made for agents right from the beginning. So, prices also go up. You have to add add-ons, renewals and upgrades and everything starts to build up and then it means that everyone that you add to your team starts to add to the cost and

3:46again, it's not built for agents first. And the cost, I know every time I put up a cost here, I have to be honest with you, I put the highest possible cost, when in reality maybe you're paying for the standard, which is what 905 a month times 12 months. I get it. You might be paying less. The point I'm trying to make is this does build up. Whatever you're paying, it builds up and it becomes infrastructure for your business

4:07and so you're kind of locked in there. So, the team behind Paperclip said, "You know what? What happens if we start with a agent-first organization?" In fact, when I first talked to Duda months ago, as soon after he launched this, he wanted an agent-only organization and I feel like he reluctantly added added human beings, but agents and humans could work together and that's the thing

4:26that they shipped. It is a free app. You do have to run it on your computer, but then once you do, in addition to having human beings in there, you can hire, quote unquote, agents who are Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Open Claw, Gemini. I don't know why Hermes isn't on here, but it should be on here. And that's the idea. Beyond giving you project management with the whole Kanban board and the whole setup that you that you love and when you see it, you'll be amazed by just how you create a task and then you see an agent take the task and you see the agent

4:54assign it to someone else and a human being can be in the loop. But you also see like a real hierarchy of which agent does what. So, this is more than project management. It will really organize your agent team. So, every agent is in the org chart, as I said. You get to hire them from multiple providers, so you're not locked into anyone. You set a budget per company and this whole thing is free, open source, and yes, you can connect GitHub, Notion, and other tools to it. Worth noticing though, um of all of these things, I should say it is free for project management, but of course, you're going

5:27to be paying for your Claude subscription, your OpenAI, whatever it is that you're using for it. Yes, you could use um uh local models with this, too. I think the biggest issue that I have with it is that they just don't have the cloud yet and I don't love having a whole computer running just for this and I don't love that they don't have a mobile app. Those are the two things that I think are are not on here, but I wish I had put them

5:51on there. Oh, by the way, here's a thing that I've been too embarrassed to say, and I did put this on here to force myself. I forgot about it. I'm trying to get to 100,000 subscribers. I tell my friends, I tell my wife, I tell my my my kids. I do tell my kids, kind of weird. And I figured I'm too embarrassed to ever tell the audience. So, I'm going to ask you if you if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe. If you like this type of content, I put hours and hours of effort into it. I'd love

6:12for you to uh subscribe. Okay, that felt a little awkward, but I'm glad I did it. Okay, Basic Memory is here to replace Notion. Now, Notion is a tool that a lot of us are using to store memory for our agent. So, you tell your agent something like, "Here is my lease. Here is my um uh what am I what am I putting into my agent? I put my medication in. And so, I tell my agent to do it, and I want my

6:35agent to put it into some memory system. Notion is the memory system that most people use. You can see on their homepage it's now where teams and agents ship together. So, they're really making an effort to be the tool for for agents. But, with it, if you use their AI, you quickly run out of AI credits. You also, and I do know though that they now are allowing the Open AI subscription in there. So, there is some flexibility on that. But, you then lock yourself into their software, and the more people you

7:03hire, the more people you have to pay. And they do have this weird thing that they do where when you send a note to somebody, even if they're outside of your team, they have one of these big buttons that come up and say, "Do you also want to add them to the team?" And you accidentally hit yes because they didn't write it exactly the way that I said it. They write it in a way that makes you think, "Of course I should hit the button." And suddenly you're paying for people who aren't even in your organization for months and years. And

7:24yes, the cost does add up with Notion. I'm not putting Notion down. I'm just saying there are real issues here. And so, there's a new system that is simpler, so simple that it doesn't get a lot of rave reviews even on GitHub. But, all it does is it's a small uh small studio that created Basic machines. It's been around since 2021 and and what they've done is they said, "You know what? What if all we do is just basic text. We're not going to do the deep databases and embedding and all the things that Notion does. We're just

7:52going to keep basic text text files." And so, everything your AI learns is now written in plain markdown files on your own folders. That means all these different agents can also access it. That was really important to me when looking for an alternative. To be able to not just know that my agents can access it like a folder on my computer, but that they have a real direct connection to it and that's what you get. And even though you don't get the deep database and embeds and everything else that you get with Notion, you do have wiki links, which is essentially all you need. Markdown files

8:21with good organizations link. Human beings don't Human beings want more than that. Like you want the pretty design and everything. Agents don't need more than that. And so, it ships with that. Markdown files, connect all your agents directly in, search that works really well. That's what it is. Install it with one command and now it can start to sync

8:38up. The thing that's worth noticing is if you do want to host a solution, they've got 15 $15 a month. I don't think that's bad. I like when these companies say, "Hey, you know what? We're going to give it to you for free, but we're also going to make money if we host it for you." I I like the option to be to be able to switch over to the hosted option. The The other thing is this is really not going to be the tool that you're going to enjoy using. If you love Notion, you're not going to love typing in this and reading in this as much, but I will

9:04say this to you. If you're using an agent, my hunch is that you're no longer looking at your documents in Notion or whatever tool you're using nearly as much as you were maybe a month ago or a year ago. And it's less and less you looking at it and it's more and more the agent looking at it and you being able to go and glance at it if you want to and transition if you want to do that. But, I will say

9:26that is worth noticing about it. Okay. By the way, this interview is sponsored by Zapier. I will tell you how Zapier fits into this and then you decide if you want it for yourself or not. Here's the thing that I had. I had my Grok bot agent constantly do stuff for me and suddenly my costs ran up. I asked my agent, "Why is my cost going up? I'm not doing crazy stuff with it." And the agent said, "Well, it's because you've got these repetitive tasks." And with the repetitive tasks what tasks what happens is you pay for a genius level agent like basically paying for a

9:54McKinsey level intelligence to do intern level work, which is just basic tasks. Check my calendar. Tell me if there's something in my email. And if you offload those to what they now call at Zapier next-gen zaps, they will use code for these routine tasks so that you reduce your expenses and you get more reliability. Code is more reliability than AI because it's it's less um it's not about predicting what's what should be done. It's about knowing exactly what should be done. There it is. There's a link to it. I know that this uh I had

10:21trouble finding this URL even in Google. I got it directly from the company. I'll put it in the link below if you want to try them out. Okay. Next. [snorts] Okay. When you start working with agents, your expenses start to go up with Claude Code and I've got an alternative called free LLM API. I did an interview with the founder. I spent so much time with him busting his chops to make sure that this all makes sense and it does. And I want to show it to you. Okay. First, in this case I'm using Claude Code as

10:46the hugely popular AI coding assistant. This is the brains of a lot of the work that you do. You could replace it with Codex whatever you want. The idea here is you do have a brain and you want the best but not for everything. So, what happens with Claude Code is you hit your limits and I know they're being more generous especially for some reason this month. I don't know what it is about October that they suddenly are getting more generous. I just got free API credits from them out of nowhere. Um they're also now doing a free startup thing. So, you should ask for all those

11:15and should absolutely get it. And even if you do, you will still run out of usage, which is why um no matter what the price is, it's going to feel like it's too much. Uh I put down $240 a year cuz that's the minimum you're paying for it. I pay $200 a month for it and there are people on our team who are paying

11:30for multiple $200 a month subscription. So, it does add up. So, in walks this product designer from Microsoft. He is in Dublin, and he built something called free LLM API. The insight he had was all these different providers are giving free samples of their of of their LLMs. He goes, "What if I just create a tool that lumps them all in together and makes it easy for whatever coding agent, whatever assistant agent you have to access them? And when one runs out of free credit, you go to the next and the next and the next and the next." That was the idea behind it. And that's where

12:01he got now it's I think it's 635 different ones that you can string together and make work for you. I'm not saying that you have to at this point completely kill your subscriptions, but I will tell you I have talked to him. He is building a ton. He's a Microsoft employee, so we're not and he's doing this in his off time. So, but he's not just some some guy who doesn't get technology and doesn't need

12:25much. He gets it. And he's still able to not pay for for uh LLMs because he's just using the free stuff that's on on the internet. So, it is possible to completely kill it and even if you don't, you should be able to reduce your price with this. So, he comes with It comes with um a collection of hundreds of free LLM usage. You're going to keep running out of them, but it doesn't matter cuz this software is going to transition you from one to the other. He also has a desktop app for Mac and Windows to make it really easy for you. And if you prefer

12:57not even have that, he has other options including an Android option. So, he's making it very easy for you to notice it. The thing that I think that people keep saying is um that I didn't even add on here. You know, every time I write this, I think I have it and then I think, "No, there's something else I want to say." Here's the things that right now are feeling top-of-mind for me. Yes, you should know that you're going to get like deep seek. You're not going to get Anthropic's models. They're not giving it free through this through

13:20this approach. The other thing is that you should know that you will eventually run out of them. And I grilled him on it. And one of the things he said was, "Andrew, if you run out of deep seek from one provider, there's another provider offering deep seek, and another, and another, and another." She goes, "Yes, you will be interrupted. I mean, you will switch. You won't even notice it because it's often the same model." And then he said, "You know, Andrew, for certain things you want to switch from model to model. Some models are better at writing. Some models are better at coding. Some models are better at design

13:45and image and so and so that's the goal here." Um there's another thing that I thought was an issue, which is he specifically says, "Hey, watch out um when you're using it." But the watch out is you should not be building this free LLM access into your software. This is something you use to build with, to create your personal AI agents. It is not something that if you create a note-taking app and you want your users to have uh um AI in it that you then bundle this free stuff in it. That's where you're going to get in trouble. And the other thing that people complain about is this

14:16$19 a year add-on. I don't think it's a big deal. It's $19 a year. You don't need it. And all he's giving you with the $19 a year is earlier access to models that are free. Um so, as soon as he finds out about them, he first makes them available to people who pay $19 a year, and then he

14:31puts them into everyone else. Not a big deal. Great. Great. Great. And you'll you'll be fine even if you don't pay a penny. Next. Voice Studio replaces Eleven Labs for voice. Eleven Labs does beautiful voices. It is the popular AI voice generator. The thing is this is it's not that novel anymore. There are tons of companies that will now be able to tons of free repos, honestly. Tons of free programs that will let you duplicate voice and create your own voices uh for free. I had a hard time even picking one. And the thing about Eleven Labs is that every retry, every tweak burns credits. And

15:07there's something about knowing that you're charged all the time that makes you more cautious about using it. And then you got to uh then you've got to pay as you're building it. Then you've got uh support, which you think since you're paying you should get a human being or you should get some really good quality, but people complain on Trustpilot here. This is the source for

15:25every one of these complaints. Um that that it's an AI bot that's not really supportive and helpful at 11 Labs. I'm not looking to put 11 Labs down. I know it's good, but I also know there are problems with it, and one of them is the price that does start to add up. And if what you're doing is something professional that you're creating to sell, I get it. Pay them their price. If you're doing it for client work and you've got someone who's paying you to create YouTube videos for them, for sure, pay if this is what works for you. For most of our users, that's not what we're doing. And so, in

15:53walks Voice Studio. It was started in April by a startup CTO in India. Within 10 days, researchers released Omni Voice, a free AI voice model that speaks over 600 languages, and Voice Studio was built around it. In 6 months, it passed 3,800 code updates and 61,000 stars on GitHub. Here is uh the link. I've got links, by the way, to this whole thing. You can download this whole report, and up here you'll always see a link to the repo. And of course,

16:20below I'll have them directly, too. The reason I picked this, and I should say there are multiple companies now, multiple free products now that will let you do voice. I wanted you to have a tool that will work directly with your agent. And can I zoom in on this? Yeah. And see, you can also give it to your agent, and they've got a really nice uh mobile app and a website that you can experiment with. That's the reason that

16:42I like it. So, Voice Studio free desktop app copies a voice from a short clip, read reads any script in that voice, dubs your videos into other languages. It is phenomenal. There is a paid version. I'll talk about that in a moment. It does the thing that you're looking for, especially if what you're looking for is your own personal use. You've got a document that you need your agent to tran- to to speak out to you. You want your agent to create a podcast out of some material that you want to listen to on a day-to-day basis. It's really good for things like that. You want to turn a

17:15book into audiobook chapters. By the way, I'm noticing a lot of you are giving your agents books. In one of the past shows I said, "How is everyone getting a free book? Like where are you downloading it?" And people gave me multiple options for how they're getting it. Um so, I know that a lot of you are getting books. For some reason, a lot of you even will go and uh for some reason, I get it. You buy the book and then you say, "Now that I bought it, I can't get the Kindle or the paper version into my agent. I'm now going to go and get it

17:39online and get a PDF of it and then I give it to my agent." I know a lot of you are doing that. And then what you might want to do is turn it into an audiobook that works for you. And so, this is the tool that can help you do it. Okay. The thing that I wanted to point out is there is a pro version, $99 a year. It adds a business license for the app. Um but the voice model still keeps its own rules. This thing is going to run best on a recent Mac or PC with

18:05Nvidia graphic card and 6 GB of memory. An ordinary computer works just much slower. [sighs] Uh um okay. Uh I guess I should say this. Some of you do have older Macs and they can't run it. You do need 10 GB of free disk space. For most of you, this is going to work on your main computer and

18:23I think you're going to enjoy it. Number six. Scrape Ling replaces Fire Crawl. Scrape Ling has 87,000 stars on GitHub. This will help scrape web pages to feed your agent the data it needs. Now, Fire Crawl, you probably know, it's hugely popular web scraping service for agents. It turns any web page into clean text that an AI can read. And it says over 1.5 million people build with it. I don't know if that's true. Maybe 1.5 million people have built over time. I don't know. I will say this, absolutely incredibly popular. It could, for all I know, be over 1.5 million people using

18:56it today. Just seems like a big number. All right. The problem is unused credits vanish each month. You're starting to think through everything that you do. Do I want to get this? Do I want to get that? And then, of course, pages are blocked by bot detectors and they still cost credits. People are complaining on

19:12GitHub. This has been an issue and and it cost money. We're not looking at a at a cheap product here. Scraping then started 2 years ago. It's I think it's 2 years ago exactly this week by developer in Egypt. This guy had 14 years of experience building security and hacking tools. And then he decided that he would focus his

19:34attention on web scraping. He is really good at what he does. Here's what it does. It will get past bot blockers. I don't think all of them for free. It is very effective. It is very good. People have told me that they've that they had no problem getting through Cloudflare turnstile out of the box. I wonder if it's an everything all the time issue. And Hermes Agent I think already ships with Scraping as an optional skill that you install with one command. I know when I installed it it

20:04came with it. Um So, you're going to get past Cloudflare's checks with its stealth fetcher. You're going to scrape a page with one from the command line without writing a single line of code. Turn any page into clean markdown that your AI can use. This is really an effective tool. Um is there anything worth worth noticing

20:23here? It's a Python library. Scraping has rules. I You know what? When I put this I try to say like every single thing including like my second choice was Crawl 4 AI so I added it on here. And now I'm thinking, do I need to really tell you Crawl 4 AI? Am I really adding too many too many like things at the end

20:40of this? Maybe on this one I am. All right. Um yeah, I was really like looking for stuff to add on here as potential issues. The only thing I'll say is that nothing is perfect when it comes to scraping. Enjoy this one. I think you're really going to love it. Scraping 87,000 stars on GitHub. Let's go to the final

20:56one. [snorts] The final one is Buzz. It replaces Slack. It's team chat where your agents really are members. It has 35,000 GitHub stars. This thing was really big for the week that it came out and then people stopped talking about it. It's not it actually just lost its buzz. But I want to tell you why this is still very relevant today. All right, first Slack hugely popular um team chat app,

21:19but notice what's on their homepage now. It says all your people and AI agents working together. That is their offer. I use it. I have to tell you, I don't think that's true. Yes, it's get it gets very expensive especially as you start putting more people into this system. But I also think that they limit the data that my agent can have. I'll give

21:39you one example of it. I want my agent to just tell me what are my unread messages. I really love how on my phone I could see my unread messages in one of these things where I could flip to the left and right. I wanted my agent to build something like that for me for Slack so that I could do it on my desktop. You can't see what's read and what's unread because it's one of many things that Slack keeps your agents from being able to do with its software. So as much as they now are hyping up that they want agents and yes, they are

22:07enabling more and more agent access in it. It's still not enough. It's still not what you and I would expect if we want an agent to be in the in the loop. We want it to have all the access. We're paying good price for it, right? I mean, the more people I have on my team, the more I pay and you start to add more people even part-time to the team and it

22:26starts to really build up. Meanwhile, Buzz comes from Block. This is the people behind Square and the Cash App and they made a huge buzz around it when they launched. In fact, I did a video on it and I think I got 70,000 views back when I was hardly getting any views at all on my videos because everyone was curious about it. Since then,

22:44there isn't much attention to this. Having said that, I talked to you all. I love talking to people who are building in this audience and I've seen multiple builders here who are running Buzz as the way of communicating with their agents and their people. I I still use Buzz. I still have Buzz on my phone. Where is it? Um here. My son was just

23:04asking me about it. But see here, look. This is This is also another Oh, age-appropriate experiences and apps is an Apple uh thing. Here Here's Buzz. It's right right there somehow. I hope you can see it. Uh the little bee. Anyway, really good mobile app, unlike a lot of other projects. Um agents get their own seat. Beyond agents getting their own seat and being able to mention an agent like a human being, you could actually start building agents within this system. So, if you don't have a Hermes agent, you could build a Hermes agent within this. If you don't want the Hermes agents, you could just

23:37build your own Claude code agent and use your subscription. Um because I think Claude sees this as a terminal connection uh instead of an app. So, Anthropic, as much as they're really um cracking down, they've been allowing this. All right. So, you get an iPhone and Android app that I think are really good right from the start. You get the ability to get channels, threads, direct messages, all the things that you would expect. They also have this thing where they're enabling local models on your system that I think it's still too early for most of us, but I know many of you will still get excited

24:15about that and use it. Worth noticing, they call it an unfinished product. I don't think that's uh that's true. It's always going to be unfinished finished. I think the bigger issue here is that they are losing excitement and attention and what they need is if you take a look at um what did we see earlier? Uh paperclip. I couldn't think of the word for a moment. Paperclip just passed 100,000 stars. It's basically this dude, Doda, and his team building on their own. They don't have the funding that Buzz has. They don't have the the the star power that Jack Dorsey brings to Buzz. And they're at 100,000

24:50stars, active participation, lots of usage, constant improvement. Um YouTube videos being created and getting a lot of views. It was a recent video by Chuck, what's his name? Uh Network Chuck that got over a million views just going through Paperclip. Meanwhile, Buzz is not getting that kind of attention. So, you're building into a platform that is really solid, and the big thing that is worth noticing is it what if it goes away? Having said that, I don't think it's an issue because if you're using this with your agents and with your people, your data is still yours. You will be able to have an agent move it

25:22into whatever other platform you want. All right. Thank you for watching, and again, I'm going to repeat this thing because I I knew that I'd be too much of a wuss to say it at the end of the video, so I put a slide here knowing that I would hit the next button and bring it up. I'm trying to get to 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. Truthfully, I don't think I'm I'm there. Like, my velocity isn't there to

25:39get to it. Um but I think if I put in work and produce videos like this, um that I think I could get to it by the end of the year, and I'm going to make the ask and say, if you like this and you want more of these types of videos, please subscribe. And if you want another one right now, I've got one here on the screen, and I'll see you in that one

25:55next.