10 Github Repos That Will Kill Your Monthly Subscriptions

0:00I'm going to give you 10 replacements to 10 popular apps that so many people are paying for, but this is about more than just free versus paid. This is about the ability to actually build. We're talking about every one of these is on GitHub, which means that you can do what many people who watch my past GitHub shows have done. They take the source code, they throw it at Codex or Claude or whatever, and they say, "I want you to take that feature and make it into a product that's meant for me." Or I want you to take that feature and add it to a product I'm working on. Or I want you to

0:23take this whole thing and build it for me, but with these tweaks. So, this is about free, yes, but it's also about tools that you can build yourself to your own personal needs. Timestamps and links to everything below. Let's get into it. Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. And the very first one, Notion versus AppFlowy. Notion, great document manager, right? But with Notion, your company's memory lives in Notion. Every decision your team made is in Notion. Every spec, every retro,

0:50every this, every that is all in Notion. And if you're using it for personal reasons, all that stuff is in there, too. And then Notion charges you 10 bucks per seat per month to keep accessing it. Then $20 for business. And then, don't get me started on AI. Because if you want to give one person on the team AI, you've got to give everyone on the team AI, and you don't know what it costs. And do these people even need AI within Notion? It just starts to get a little bit out of control. And so, in walks a team that built a replacement in Flutter and Rust,

1:16and they gave it away. It started in 2021, so we're looking at a project with history to it. And their stated mission in one sentence is to make it possible for anyone to create apps that suit their needs well. That is my mission, too. So, AppFlowy, it's open source alternative to Notion. And here's the thing, it actually has a really good desktop app. It has 75,000 people who started. It has 360 two contributors and over 100 releases. This is a great product with good history. It ships with documents, wikis, notes with a block editor, database grids. I love Kanban boards, it has that. We're looking at

1:53sites, AI features built in. We got templates, so much of what you'd expect on an app that you get and you get to control. And here's the thing worth noting though, that this is from a company and they do have a hosted plan and that's where their business model is. So yes, you can absolutely run it completely for free and yes, if you prefer to work with

2:13that company, you can also do that. App Flowy. Let's go to the next one. Google Photos versus Image. Google Photos, fantastic photo servicing, photo hosting service. I think it's great. And if you're with the Google ecosystem, you're probably using it. The problem with it is that Google then knows what your children look like at 4 years old. It knows which hospital they were delivered in. Google Photos even knows the exact coordinates of the house that you grew up in because of all the data that travels with every photo that you

2:40take. And then Google charges you rent to keep it. So a developer built a replacement and then team picked it up full-time. It's called Image. It's a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. Now look at the numbers. 110,000 stars on GitHub. Of course, I'll have a link for you below. 463 people contributed to it. There have been over 300 releases. It's not a weekend project. It's a team shipping like a funded company,

3:06but no one is metering your usage. Here's what it comes with. Automatic backup from iOS and Android. Selective album backup, so you choose what lives on your what leaves your phone. Facial recognition running on your hardware. Search by project, by face, by description. I love map and date browsing. How many times do I say, "Find me photos from this year." or "Find me

3:27photos from when I lived in Argentina." I want to see where I was. It's got that and so many other features. It is there, but here's the thing worth noting on this one and that is and the readme opens up with this immediately. It says, "Follow the 3-2-1 backup plan." meaning they really want you to be aware that you've got

3:44responsibility when you're self-hosting. It is on you to back up your photos if you're not paying Google to do it. Next. Oh, subscribe. By the way, every week I do a top 10 GitHub repo show where we go over the top hottest growing repos. If you like this, you're going to love what we show every week, so subscribe to get that. And then, as you can see here, I also talk to other creators and other builders and other founders about how they're using AI to build tools. Often, we do a screen share, so you can learn and follow along. Thanks for the subscription and the high five and

4:15everything else you do. I'm going to move on. DocuSign and Documento. DocuSign is that document signing service that you get from your lawyer, you get from everybody. And if you're like me, you just hate the look and the experience of it. And if you're a user of it who pays, which I am not, but if you are, DocuSign's going to charge you 11 bucks a month and then give you only five envelopes. Five. Not

4:35500. Five. Imagine if you paid for Google Docs and they told you you could only write five docs a month on it. Somehow, this flies when it comes to DocuSign. And that's for one person, $132 a year for signing five things a month. And for a company, it's 45 bucks a month. And then, you're still capped. They've become the thing that's just default. Even when people don't send out

4:59a DocuSign, they call it a DocuSign. [snorts] It doesn't have to be that way, because two developers built a replacement. It was announced in 2022, shipped the first version in 2023. This is about more than just money. It is about encryption and making the world more open. That's what this is about. They do they want to remove the toll booth. The

5:17Documento team does. And the savings are not just the full story here. It's also that you get to take control of your documents and not pass them on to another company. And that actually has both plusses and minuses to it, right? Sometimes, you want that other company standing behind the authenticity of a signature on a document. But if you want to take it on for yourself, you've got real PDF signatures built in on standard PDF signing libraries. You've got

5:39self-hosted audit trail on your server. One-click style deploys, signing in your uh in your own language, templates, tag releases, and of course, as I said before, you should be aware that like other products that you're going to see, this has an enterprise plan, and that's where that's where the business model is. Next, Miro versus Excalidraw. Miro is that hugely popular whiteboard

6:04that your COO probably loves, right? But, it charges eight bucks a month per member to draw a box with an arrow coming out of it. 20 bucks per member on the business plan. Don't even get me started on the enterprise plan because you need 30 people or more for that, and then you have to contact sales. And so, when the trial ends, what happens? Well, they don't delete your board, which is nice, but it does get locked, and it is then held hostage on their systems. So, a group of developers said, "We're going to build a whiteboard that everyone can use, and we're going to put it under the

6:30MIT license." Excalidraw now has 129 stars on GitHub, and this is for a whiteboard. Imagine how great of a whiteboard you have to be to beat I think they've got more stars than anything else that we've talked about here today. Or and then I will huge, very successful, wildly successful, and if you want to try it, [snorts] if you just go to Excalidraw's website, and of course, I'll link you to it all here, there's you could just go and immediately start using it. They don't ask you for an email address, they don't

6:58ask you for jack. And then, you just start to draw and use it, and if you want to share, there's a button to share, and then you can share it. And then, guess what? When you're sending it to someone, they don't have to sign jack, either. It's just right there. This is an incredible user experience, even if you're not hosting it from Excalidraw. And if I keep repeating the name Excalidraw, it's because it took me forever to learn how to pronounce the name. I don't know what it was about it. All right, you got an

7:17infinite canvas here without an account. That's my wife calling, I'm going to talk to her later. You got hand-drawn style rendering, you got dark mode, you got shape libraries, export to PNG, SVG, clipboard, you got open format. Do I need to tell you about zoom panning, undo and redo? Guess what? It has undo and redo. Congratulations. [snorts] All right, but you should know that the end-to-end encryption live collaboration is a feature on the hosted excalidraw.com application. The repository is the editor itself, and it is what you embed or build on. Running a full collaborative server yourself is a bigger job than running the editor. For solo drawing and for embedding, this is

7:56a non-issue, though. Oof. Next is Zapier, my sponsor. If you're using AI agents the way that I am, you probably want to give them the ability to read your email, to add to your Notion board, to add to all these other tools that you're using, maybe to add to your Google Drive. But maybe there are some things you don't want it to do. Like you like the agent, you think it's powerful, but it's kind of cutting edge, and you're worried about it sending email from you. You're worried about it being able to delete

8:17files on your Google Drive. Well, when you use Zapier, you've got access to over 8,000 different tools like the ones that I mentioned. And for each tool, there's like a checkbox that you select. Here's what I want to give it access to. It can read my email, but it cannot send my email. It can draft my message, but it cannot uh do this or cannot do that. That's the idea here. All these tools, and a company that is over 10 years old, and that I've known literally since before a day one. I'm their very first customer, I'm very proud to say. Before they even had a company, I sent the money on

8:46PayPal because I wanted the tools that they were building, and I've been a user ever since. Go to zapier.com/mcp. Try this for free, you'll see why I keep talking about it. Thanks to my sponsor. [snorts] All right. Figma versus Penpot. Figma is that collaborative design tool that designers and developers love to use together. Um I enjoy getting Figma docs because I like parts of it. I do not like using the whole Figma

9:10experience. The thing about Figma, though, is we're looking at $16 a month for a full seat. And then there's a part that makes people really angry, and that's that developers have to pay to take a look. So, developers have a $12 a month for the cheap seats. And then on top of that, they've got this other plan, and that other plan. All right, then a company in Spain decided they're going

9:29to build a replacement. And this is way before Figma even was a thing. Penpot. They went up December 2015, over 10 years of work, and um I don't think it's a it's a match one-for-one with Figma, but it is an open-source open-source alternative that aims to do the same thing as Figma for free. [snorts]

9:52Hm. And the nice thing about them is the way that they will create your files is using web standards instead of their own proprietary thing. So, here's what it ships with: free seats for everyone, including your developer, congratulations. An inspection mode that hands developers usable code straight out of the design. Um I'm not going to say too much about this. I'm actually going to move on cuz for most people the free alternative essentially or the alternative is Claude Code or Claude Design, but I do think that this is popular for a reason, and I want to make sure that you know about uh

10:21Penpot. [snorts] Um I do also think that with all of these things, if you're bringing it into uh a work operation, you should be prepared for debugging or problems if it's something like this. So, know what you're signing up for. I don't know that I would actually want my team, to be honest with you, on Penpot, but I have

10:39seen people be really happy about it. And I want to make sure that you see that there is an alternative to Figma. Next, Calendly versus cal.com. I've known this company probably since the very beginning, both of them. Calendly, incredibly popular scheduler, right? You give that one link, people can find time on your calendar, and they could book with you. But, Calendly charges you for people to book time with you. 10 bucks a seat, $16 for teams. Enterprise plan gets even higher than that, all for a link to your calendar, and then [snorts] a team that decided to compete with Calendly

11:13decided to open-source their software. It's now called cal.com. It's from the cal.com team. And what they have is everything except for the enterprise edition of their software they put out there. That means that you get bookable event types with custom availability. This is the one, by the way, that people are going to either use directly or they're going to give to their agent and say, "Create my my twisted version of it for me." So, you have your own calendar booking service with your own quirks and taste. And it'll also connect to your Google Calendar and or your Microsoft Office 365. It'll connect to Zoom, to HubSpot,

11:46etc. The nice thing is it's on your domain with not just your branding, but you can then customize it further. You and I have more than just a logo. We have a look and feel in our experience that we might want to bring on, and you get all that. And this is a self-hosted

11:59option by default. Um and again, the thing worth noticing is the enterprise features are not part of this. That's what they have kept for their company. But, if you're using it for yourself the way that I do, you're going to enjoy this. And I'm glad it's there. Mailchimp versus List Monk. Mailchimp is that most popular email newsletter company that you and your mom have seen

12:17and heard on NPR for years. But, the problem with them is that your newsletter gets expensive, more and more expensive every time someone subscribes to it. So, how many times you get a subscriber and you go, "Yay!" But, in the back of your head you say, "How close am I to hitting that next tier?"

12:31And this is not just a Mailchimp thing. Mailchimp I'm picking on because they give you 200 con- 250 contacts for free, but then the price climbs and climbs and climbs. You build the audience, they get the revenue. There's a self-hosted alternative. In fact, a lot of my friends are using Cloud to create their own self-hosted alternatives. Here's one that you don't have to start from scratch on. You just say, "Look, Cloud, take it and I want you to build it for me." And then you can customize it to you. It is called

12:56List Monk. The only thing that I want you to be aware of and I've got it here is that you have to then take on deliverability. It is not completely for free because you're also going to have to pay for um a service that will send out the mail for you. And they're not expensive. You can even get it from AWS. And then you have to take care of being in compliance so that

13:15you stay out of people's spam folders. If you're willing to take that on, this is a free alternative that you get to customize and you get to save hundreds. My email list does not cost 350 bucks a month. It goes higher and higher than that, and I've been doing it for over a decade. So, this is a nice free alternative to it that you will never have a price increase because there is no price per subscriber. So, what can you do with it? You can send to as many

13:36subscribers as your server can carry. Nobody's counting them. You got one file to install and it's running. No setup marathon, super easy, a clean dashboard of your list with your subscribers and your campaigns, open and click tracking. So, you know did my email suck because nobody opened it or did it suck because people opened it and they didn't click on anything or is it something else? All that stuff is is in here. You chat You choose your sending provider. SendGrid, that's the company I was missing before. You can use SendGrid if not AWS and you It's pennies compared to paying for Mailchimp and the others to set up a server like

14:08that to send up your send out your email. All right. You can just import your old list and walk away um and walk away from your old bill. Bitly versus Dub. Bitly is that link shortener. I have had an account with them since the very beginning. They were very big on Twitter back when Twitter was only 140 characters and if you wanted to include a link, you couldn't include a long URL, so you would shorten it. So, instead of andrew-warner.com/thisandthat.html, it would be bit.ly/aw, right? And I got to give it out. All beautiful, except Bitly's free plan currently, I think, is now five links a

14:45month. Five. It used to be infinite. Not 500, now it's five. And I say now because, boy, they just keep changing things around. I don't even know what to count on with this company. And then at the top of their pricing, it's $300 a month and then you get 3,000 links and then who knows [clears throat] what's going on? I think they have had trouble figuring out their business model since Twitter stopped needing them. And if they haven't sold to Bending Spoons yet, they probably should because they just need some stability here and to accept that they really are They're They're really just driving

15:14their customers crazy. But there's an alternative. It's Dub. A modern open-source alternative went out in August 2022. It's not a toy. If you look at their read me, you're going to see that Twilio uses it, Buffer uses it, Framer, Perplexity, Vercel, so many companies that you know. That's [snorts] what it's about. And it also will, beyond shortening the link, cuz it's no longer about link shortening now, but that's an important thing. It's about the attribution, to know where did I get my my click on that link? And what happened when somebody clicked that

15:45link? That's what Dub will do. It tells you when it's clicked on. But here, here's the part that I had in my notes. I knew I had it here. Dub is built to tell you when the click becomes a customer with conversion tracking and affiliate program support. So, short links on your own domain. Here's what it comes with. Conversion tracking, not just click counting, affiliate program management, a documented self-hosting guide. Did I really include that on there? I must have been anxious for an extra bullet point. Of course, it comes with a with a self-hosting guide. What I mean, and honestly, you're giving it to your

16:16client anyway. All right, analytics fast enough that you can actually watch them in real time. That deserves a bullet point. And then, it's used by companies that you know. Just be aware. [snorts] Dub is open core. Almost all of the code is free and yours. A small set of enterprise folders sits outside under a separate commercial license. And that's a lot a large part where these things uh go. The enterprise is separate from what you use. But honestly, if you're like me, this is not going to be an

16:43issue for you. [snorts] TeamViewer versus RustDesk. TeamViewer, it's that remote desktop software that I think now is starting to sponsor sporting events. I see TeamViewer on people's shirts, kind of weird. [snorts] Here's the problem. You're on the phone with your mother. Her printer is not printing. You connect to her computer remotely, cuz that's what TeamViewer is about. And then 40 seconds in, the session drops, because yes, they let you use it for personal uses, but for some reason, it was commercial use detected, and boom, that's it. You're done. You

17:12can't use it. Oh, you weren't trying to conduct business. You were just trying to point an old lady's computer to her drive. I don't mean to call your your mother old, but you know what I'm talking about, right? And that's the problem here. So, someone wrote a replacement for it in Rust. RustDesk is the open-source

17:31remote desktop built for self-hosting. And if you don't like that calling your mother and helping her with her computer experience, you probably are familiar with using a desktop somewhere or a laptop at your desk and then being on a trip somewhere or at a coffee shop somewhere and you want to access it remotely and it's just for personal use. But if it's flagged for commercial, you can't use it with those services without

17:51paying. So, that's the whole goal here. You get it for yourself. The one thing you're missing is you don't have that company in the middle. It's direct desk to desk, computer to computer. That middle piece is the [snorts] entire product that they're selling you over there. And with RustDesk, you don't get it. Here's what it ships with: Windows,

18:07Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS support. Your self-hosted relay, so the connection never touches anyone else's servers. We always say that. It always sounds so nefarious, like I'm telling you that you're you're going to get away with something. All right, I got to keep going here. It's taking longer than I expected. File transfer between machines. This is so helpful. You create something on one machine, you want to move it to another, you don't want to

18:25email it to yourself, it comes with it. And the installation, normal app on the app stores. Compiled native app on every platform. All right, worth noticing, I already told you about that before. Um it this is one of those situations where at 11:00 at night if there's an issue from a hotel, it's now your issue. [snorts] WhisperFlow versus Fluid Voice. The last one, I used uh Fluid Voice here. I used dictation to

18:54to put these pages together for you. And what you do with it is you just hold the button down on your keyboard and you start typing and then it uh types it You start talking and then it types it on your screen. So, WhisperFlow listens to your voice and then it sends your voice to their server, one that you do not own, and then it decides how many words you're allowed to say before they start to charge you. 2,000 words a week right now is on their free free plan. That's about 15 minutes of talking. 15 minutes and

19:20then the thing you have to do is pay. I'm actually not so much bothered by the price here for it. I'm much more bothered by I don't really like the way the Whisper flow works. They're great with numbering and they have a lot of G Wiz features, but it doesn't really work very well. It doesn't Do I have an accent? No, but it still seems like I have an accent for it to it cuz it keeps getting my my words

19:39wrong. [snorts] So, enter Fluid Voice. Oh, let me also point this out. How many times is there an issue where you say something into your computer, and now it lives on somebody else's system, and you don't realize that now it's out there to potentially haunt you and be used against you even if it's

19:53taken out of context? I don't like sending every word I have to somebody else's computer. With Fluid Voice, it is I'm going to skip over here. With Fluid Voice, it is all directly on your computer. This thing is so new, September 2025. I've been actually DMing with the with the developer of this trying to get him to come on and do this or or another one of the programs with me because he got 95,000

20:1390 9500 stars very quickly. And the beauty of it is it's on your computer, so it works faster. It doesn't have to have that step of sending it into the cloud. It also will show you on your screen as you're talking, it'll type out the words that you're saying, so you know that it's got it accurate, and you know that it's working. And then it pastes it on, and if you want to add AI to it and you prefer or want for some reason to add your your OpenAI or your Anthropic APIs so you can do more with AI with it, which I have not, you're welcome to do

20:42that. And up until recently, the big complaint here was there is no Windows version. Well, guess what? There is a Windows version of it, and guess what? People have also taken this, and then they've tweaked it and created their own versions of it. I know because I did a very popular YouTube video on this alone, and people have shown me how they took it, gave it to Claude, and then built some other things with it. So, you

20:59get speech-to-text. You pick your engine, so if you want something fast, um you get it if it means that you have a bigger file on your computer which I do. It's a It's a It's maybe it's a trade-off you're willing to make. I know I am. Uh This one I like a lot. Live preview

21:16while you're talking. Nothing like it. No one else as I've seen does it. Global hot key. It's super It's super effective. Audio history and daily usage stats. I don't know why you people love it, but people do love seeing how many words they type with their voice. And one one line install. Actually, I would say it's one click install. You just download and double click or drag it uh

21:35to a folder to go. [snorts] All right. I don't know why I clicked the repo. Let's move over. Worth noticing um it's macOS up until just a moment ago. I don't know if he fully if he fully released it yet, but he DM'd me and he said anyone who wants it will be able to get it on Windows. If you do want it, I'll have a link so that you can uh I I can help you skip the uh the wait list. In fact, what I'll do is I'll put this whole report below this. If you get this report, I and um if you get this report, just hit reply

22:04on my email and I and tell me that you want the Windows version and I will ask him to give you the Windows version. It is there. It is for you. I'm so glad that you saw this. I'm uh hopped up on this stuff because I'm excited about what you all are going to do with it. If you used any of this, I'd love for you to email me. I'll have my email on my YouTube page. Of course, subscribe. And if there's anything else that you think

22:23I should have included here, hit me up. Let me know. We do a show every week where I cover this stuff and I want to tell the world about what you're making even if it doesn't have thousands of stars. If it even has one, I want to be I want to be aware of it and I want to tell people about it. So, see you in the next video. Oh, speaking of the next video, I have one right here full of repos that

22:41I think you need to see. See you there.