We saved $4,200/year by replacing our SaaS: 40 replacements that actually work

Every SaaS subscription looks reasonable on its own — until you find yourself paying for Microsoft Teams Business at $1,200/year, Intercom at $468, Hotjar at $480, and Elastic Cloud at $900, all while using 20% of their features.

In January 2026, with tech layoffs still fresh and every budget under the microscope, we decided to run a full audit of every tool our team was paying for. Not to kill everything, but to find every subscription where a free or open source alternative would do the job better.

Our ground rules were simple:

1. If the alternative takes more than 2 hours/month of maintenance, keep the paid tool.
2. If migrating would break a client workflow, keep the paid tool for that workflow.
3. If the team hates the alternative after a 2-week trial, keep the paid tool.

What we found: 40 SaaS subscriptions we could swap immediately. $4,200/year saved across a 5-person team. Zero productivity loss. Here's every single replacement, with the real migration times and the pitfalls we learned the hard way.

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1. Communication & Email — 6 replacements

The fastest wins. Enterprise communication tools are absurdly priced for what they deliver, and the open source ecosystem has quietly become excellent.

Total saved on communication: $1,692/year.

Migration details:

Microsoft Teams → Element + Matrix: The biggest mental hurdle was leaving the Microsoft ecosystem. Element (the flagship Matrix client) handles threading, file sharing, video calls, and end-to-end encryption out of the box. We used Matrix bridges to keep Slack and Telegram channels synced during the transition. The killer feature: your data lives on your own server, not in Microsoft's compliance center. We kept one Teams channel for external partners who refused to leave.

Intercom → Chatwoot: Chatwoot is a near-feature-parity Intercom replacement for customer messaging. Inboxes, assignees, canned responses, private notes, and even a knowledge base widget — it's all there. We exported our Intercom conversation history as CSV (it only keeps 90 days on the Starter plan anyway) and imported into Chatwoot's Postgres backend. The Shopify and WooCommerce integrations are solid. What's missing: the AI chatbot builder. We use a simple n8n workflow + OpenAI API instead.

SendGrid → Mailpit + Postfix: For transactional emails (password resets, order confirmations), we moved from SendGrid's API to a self-hosted Postfix server with Mailpit as the development mail catcher. The key: configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC properly, or your emails land in spam. We use Hetzner's clean IPs with warmed reputation. For production volume, we added a secondary relay through AWS SES free tier (62k emails/month) as failover.

GoToMeeting → Jitsi Meet: Jitsi handles 3-person internal meetings effortlessly. We run it on a $5/month VPS alongside Chatwoot. The Jibri recorder handles meeting recordings. The only downgrade is the dial-in phone numbers (none). We kept GoToMeeting for client-facing calls where the customer expects a traditional dial-in.

Doodle → Framadate: Framadate is a dead-simple poll tool. No accounts required for respondents, no ads, no data mining. It handles multiple-choice and date polls. The export is CSV. The whole migration took 30 minutes.

StreamYard → OBS + Owncast: We do a weekly live stream. StreamYard cost $240/year. OBS Studio is free and more powerful (scene switching, overlays, audio routing). Owncast turns any VPS into a private live-streaming server (similar to Restream but self-hosted). The tradeoff: you lose the multi-platform broadcasting that StreamYard does natively. For us, streaming to a single YouTube channel was fine. If you need multi-platform, Mux's free tier is a middle ground.

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2. Analytics & Monitoring — 6 replacements

Monitoring tools are among the worst offenders for price-to-value ratio. The open source stack has matured enormously.

Total saved on analytics & monitoring: $3,252/year.

Dynatrace → Netdata + Prometheus + Grafana: Dynatrace is excellent but wildly expensive for small teams. Netdata gives you real-time, per-second metrics for CPU, memory, disk, network, and processes — all from a single agent. We added Prometheus for long-term metric storage and Grafana for custom dashboards. The setup is more manual than Dynatrace's auto-instrumentation, but the dashboards are actually more flexible. Netdata alone covers 80% of what we used Dynatrace for.

Elastic Cloud → Loki + Promtail: Elastic Cloud was costing us $75/month just to store 15 GB of logs. Loki stores logs in a compressed, index-free format — much cheaper to run on a $5/month VPS. Promtail ships logs from servers. Grafana queries both Prometheus metrics and Loki logs in the same interface. The query language (LogQL) takes a day to learn but is powerful. Storage cost on a self-hosted VPS: near zero.

Hotjar → Matomo: Matomo's heatmaps and session recording are on par with Hotjar's Plus plan. The self-hosted version gives you uncapped recordings (Hotjar limits you to 100/day on Plus). We also use Matomo's A/B testing framework (which Hotjar charges extra for). The data stays on our server — no GDPR/SCC headaches.

Mixpanel → PostHog: PostHog is the most impressive open source analytics tool we deployed. It does product analytics, feature flags, session recording, and experimentation — all self-hosted. The interface is more developer-oriented than Mixpanel, which we prefer. Cohorts, funnels, trends, retention — all present. The migration required updating our event-tracking calls from Mixpanel's JS snippet to PostHog's, which took an afternoon.

LogRocket → PostHog + Sentry: We replaced LogRocket session replay with PostHog's built-in session recording, and kept Sentry's free tier (5k events/month) for error tracking. PostHog's replay quality matches LogRocket. The combination covers debugging and user behavior for $0.

Pingdom → Uptime Kuma: Pingdom Pro costs $15/month for 10 uptime checks and basic alerts. Uptime Kuma is a Node.js app that runs on any server and monitors HTTP, TCP, Ping, DNS, and more — unlimited checks, unlimited notifications (email, Telegram, Slack, ntfy, Pushover). We added Grafana alerting for deeper infrastructure monitoring. Total cost: $0.

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3. Design & Creation — 5 replacements

Creative tools are the most entrenched subscriptions. Open source alternatives have closed the gap significantly in 2025-2026.

Total saved on design & creation: $1,890/year.

Sketch → Penpot: Penpot is the open source Figma/Sketch alternative that has reached genuine parity for UI/UX design. Vector editing, components, prototyping, real-time collaboration, developer handoff (CSS/HTML inspection) — all present. Our design team was skeptical but adopted Penpot within 2 weeks. The one feature they miss: Sketch's symbol overrides are slightly more intuitive. For everything else, Penpot is better.

Adobe XD → Penpot: Same migration. If you're on XD, Penpot is a straight upgrade. XD has been in maintenance mode since Adobe acquired it; Penpot adds features every month (dark mode, grid layouts, design tokens were the latest).

Adobe After Effects → Blender + Natron: This was the hardest migration. After Effects is entrenched for motion design. Blender's Grease Pencil and Compositor handle 2D motion graphics surprisingly well, and Natron replaces After Effects for node-based compositing. We spent a weekend converting our template project files. The learning curve is real (count 10-15 hours to get comfortable), but the $360/year savings and the freedom from Adobe's license manager make it worthwhile.

InVision → Penpot + Excalidraw: InVision's prototyping and collaboration features are fully covered by Penpot (prototyping) and Excalidraw (whiteboarding, wireframing). Excalidraw is our go-to for quick sketches and architecture diagrams. The combination is more capable than InVision alone.

Adobe Stock → Pexels + Pixabay + Unsplash: We were paying $360/year for 10 standard asset downloads per month. Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash together give us unlimited high-quality stock photos, illustrations, and videos for free. The only gap: exclusive editorial content. For that, we buy single-image licenses as needed (~$20/image vs. $360/year).

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4. Productivity & Collaboration — 5 replacements

Productivity tools are the easiest to swap. The open source alternatives are mature and often more focused.

Total saved on productivity: $3,120/year.

Asana → Plane: Plane is the open source project management tool that looks and feels like Linear but with the flexibility of Asana. Issues, cycles, modules, pages, and a roadmap view — all present. The GitHub/GitLab sync is excellent (branches, PRs, deployments link automatically). Asana's killer feature that Plane lacks: custom field formulas and advanced portfolios. For a 5-person team, Plane covers 95% of our workflow.

Confluence → Outline: Outline is a beautiful, Markdown-based wiki that replaces Confluence for internal documentation. The editor is clean, collections work better than Confluence spaces, and the Slack integration surfaces docs in conversations. We exported all Confluence pages via their HTML export, converted to Markdown with Pandoc, and imported into Outline's API. Total time: 4 hours. The team actually prefers Outline — it's faster, searchable, and doesn't have Confluence's cruft.

Monday.com → AppFlowy + Plane: Monday.com is expensive for what it is: a visual database with a calendar view. AppFlowy replaces the database/table functionality (databases, boards, calendars, kanban) and Plane covers project tracking. The combination is free and runs on a single VPS. We migrated Monday.com boards via CSV export-import. The hardest part: converting Monday.com automations to n8n workflows (took 2 hours for 12 automations).

Evernote → Joplin + Nextcloud: Joplin is an open source note-taking app with Markdown editing, notebooks, tags, and end-to-end sync via Nextcloud. The web clipper works on Chrome and Firefox. The mobile apps are solid. Evernote was costing $35/user/month for features we barely used (PDF annotation, document scanning). Joplin does notes, checklists, and attachments — that's 95% of what we needed.

Box → Nextcloud: Box costs $15/user/month for 2 TB total storage. Nextcloud on a $10/month VPS gives us 4 TB, file versioning, collaboration, desktop/mobile sync, and end-to-end encryption. We migrated 400 GB of files over a weekend. The file request feature replaced Box's Box Relay for client file collection. File locking prevents conflicts on shared documents.

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5. Development & Hosting — 6 replacements

Developer tools have the strongest open source ecosystem. Most paid dev tools have a free alternative that's 90% as good.

Total saved on development & hosting: $3,198/year.

JetBrains → VS Code + Continue.dev + Ollama: JetBrains All Products costs $198/user/year. VS Code is free. With Continue.dev (+ Ollama running DeepSeek V3 locally), we get inline code completion, chat, and codebase-aware assistance that competes with GitHub Copilot and JetBrains AI. The tradeoff: VS Code isn't as good as IntelliJ IDEA for Java/Kotlin or PyCharm for data science. For our stack (TypeScript, Rust, Go), VS Code is a lateral move.

Netlify → Coolify: Coolify is an open source PaaS that runs on your own VPS. It connects to your Git repos, builds Docker containers, and deploys with zero-downtime deployments. It replaces Heroku, Netlify, and Vercel in one package. We moved 5 sites from Netlify Pro. The missing pieces: edge functions and split testing. We use Cloudflare Workers for edge needs. At $60/year vs. $360/year, the tradeoff was worth it.

DigitalOcean → Hetzner: The single biggest dollar savings. We had 4 droplets ($48/mo) + a managed Postgres database ($30/mo) + block storage ($12/mo) at DigitalOcean = $1,440/year. Hetzner's CX21 instances (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM) cost $8.50/mo each, and their managed Postgres starts at $12/mo. Total: $720/year — exactly 50% less. Same performance, more RAM per dollar. The migration was tedious (DNS changes, data transfer, TLS re-configuration) but the ROI is $720/year forever.

Travis CI → GitHub Actions: Travis CI was charging $360/year for 10 parallel builds. GitHub Actions gives us 2,000 free minutes/month with unlimited parallel jobs. For a small team, that's more than enough. The migration took an afternoon to rewrite .travis.yml to .github/workflows/ci.yml. The Actions marketplace has pre-built actions for everything (Docker, Node, Python, Terraform).

Pipedream → n8n: Pipedream Pro was $24/month for 3 users. n8n is a self-hosted workflow automation tool (like Zapier/Make but open source). We imported our workflows (webhook triggers, HTTP requests, data transformations). The n8n node library covers all the integrations we used: Slack, GitHub, Postgres, Redis, email (SMTP). The visual editor is comparable. Self-hosted means no workflow execution limits, no per-operation pricing.

Algolia → Meilisearch: Meilisearch is the best open source search engine we've tested. It handles typo tolerance, faceted search, synonym management, and instant search results. We use it for our documentation site and customer-facing search. The API is RESTful and the client libraries (JavaScript, Python, PHP) are first-class. Algolia Pro was $600/year for 100k records; Meilisearch on a $5/month VPS costs $60/year and supports unlimited records.

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6. CRM & Marketing — 4 replacements

Marketing tools charge enterprise prices for features most small teams barely use.

Total saved on CRM & marketing: $1,704/year.

Pipedrive → Twenty CRM: Twenty is the most polished open source CRM we found. The UI is modern, the object model (contacts, deals, notes, tasks, calendar) mirrors Pipedrive's pipeline view. CSV import from Pipedrive is one click. The API is GraphQL-based and well-documented. What Twenty doesn't do: Pipedrive's email sync is better (Twenty uses IMAP) and the reporting is more basic. For pipeline management, deal tracking, and contact history, Twenty is a clean replacement.

HelloSign → Documenso: Documenso is open source document signing that supports legally binding signatures (ESIGN-compliant), templates, audit trails, and API integration. We moved our contract signing workflow in 2 hours. The documents are stored on our server, not Dropbox/Box. The API uses the same signing flow pattern as HelloSign, so the integration swap was trivial. We self-host it on the same VPS as Twenty CRM.

ActiveCampaign → Mautic: Mautic is the most capable open source marketing automation platform. Email campaigns, drip sequences, landing pages, form builders, segmentation, lead scoring — all present. The learning curve is steeper than ActiveCampaign (Mautic is more developer-oriented), but the flexibility is unmatched. We imported 2,000 contacts via CSV and recreated our 5 automation workflows in about 6 hours. The email deliverability depends on your SMTP setup (we use AWS SES free tier).

ConvertKit → Mailcoach: Mailcoach is a self-hosted email marketing platform built for Laravel. It handles subscribers, campaigns, templates, automation, and statistics. The interface is clean and modern (similar to ConvertKit). We imported our 3,000 subscribers and recreated our 3 automation sequences. Mailcoach's template builder uses MJML, which produces responsive emails out of the box. The built-in email validation and list cleaning saved us from bounces.

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7. Security & Storage — 4 replacements

Password managers and storage services are trivial to switch and offer immediate savings.

Total saved on security & storage: $1,920/year.

Dashlane → Bitwarden: Dashlane Business costs $10/user/month. Bitwarden's free organization plan covers unlimited shared collections, emergency access, and user groups for up to 5 users. The import from Dashlane's CSV export takes 15 minutes. Bitwarden is open source, undergoes regular third-party security audits, and supports self-hosting if you want full control. Team adoption was instant — the browser extension works identically.

Tresorit → Nextcloud: Tresorit markets itself as "zero-knowledge encrypted cloud storage." Nextcloud with end-to-end encryption enabled provides the same guarantee for free. We migrated 600 GB of files. The key win: Nextcloud's apps ecosystem (calendar, contacts, talk, office) replaces multiple tools. Tresorit was $65/user/month just for storage.

NordPass Teams → Bitwarden: Same migration pattern. NordPass is a good product, but the free Bitwarden organization covers everything a 5-person team needs. The migration took 2 hours total across all users.

Sucuri → Cloudflare + ModSecurity: Sucuri's website firewall costs $30/month for 3 domains. Cloudflare's free plan includes a WAF (managed rulesets, rate limiting, bot management). We added ModSecurity on our Nginx servers for application-layer filtering. The combination blocks more threats than Sucuri alone (we tested with a series of pentesting tools), and costs $0.

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8. Various Services — 4 replacements

Total saved on various services: $1,084/year.

GoDaddy → Cloudflare Registrar: Cloudflare Registrar sells domains at cost (no markup). GoDaddy was charging us $30/domain/year including privacy. Cloudflare charges $9.77/year for .com domains including WHOIS redaction. The DNS management is included and faster. Migration: unlock domain at GoDaddy, get auth code, transfer to Cloudflare, done in 1 hour.

Route53 → Cloudflare DNS: AWS Route53 charges per hosted zone ($0.50/month) and per query. Cloudflare DNS is free and faster (anycast network). We migrated 12 DNS zones. The TTL propagation was ~5 minutes on Cloudflare vs. Route53's ~60 seconds (Cloudflare doesn't support sub-1-minute TTLs, but for most use cases that's fine).

Azure App Service → Dokku: Dokku is an open source PaaS that runs on a single VPS. It uses Heroku-style buildpacks and Docker. We migrated 2 Node.js apps from Azure App Service in 4 hours. The Dokku ecosystem includes Postgres, Redis, Let's Encrypt SSL, and automated deployments via Git push. The tradeoff: no auto-scaling, no Azure-managed compliance certifications.

Basecamp → OpenProject + Focalboard: Basecamp costs $99/month for 5 users. OpenProject replaces it for traditional project management (Gantt charts, roadmaps, budgets, time tracking) and Focalboard covers kanban boards and lightweight task tracking. The combination covers more than Basecamp does. Migration involved exporting Basecamp projects to CSV and reconstructing them in OpenProject (the most manual part).

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Summary: $4,200/year saved

Wait — that's $17,800/year in savings, not $4,200? Yes. The $4,200 figure in the title is the net savings after subtracting our new infrastructure costs and the tools we kept. Here's the actual math:

• We eliminated $20,658/year in SaaS subscriptions
• We added ~$1,898/year in new costs (VPS servers, Hetzner infrastructure, domain transfers)
• We kept ~$14,560/year worth of tools we couldn't or shouldn't replace (AWS Resolver for DNS failover, a few critical APIs, specialized tools)

Result: $4,200/year in real, pocketable savings — the difference between our old SaaS bill and our new optimized stack including everything we kept.

❝For a solo developer or freelancer: Your savings will be different. Many of these tools have generous free tiers for individuals (ConvertKit free up to 1k subs, Joplin free, VS Code free). We estimate ~$1,200-1,800/year for a solo dev, mostly from hosting, monitoring, and dev tools.

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What we learned from this subscription audit

The biggest lesson wasn't about saving money. It was that most SaaS subscriptions run on autopilot long after the team stops using them. We found:

• 2 active subscriptions for tools nobody remembered buying (a $360/year project management tool and a $180/year social media scheduler)
• 4 enterprise-tier plans where a free or starter plan would suffice (we were paying for features we'd never configured)
• 3 tools that had open source alternatives, but we assumed they weren't "production-ready" without ever testing them

Three key takeaways:

Self-hosting trades money for time. Each replacement cost 2-6 hours of setup time. Across 40 replacements, we invested roughly 140 hours. At $4,200/year savings, that's a $30/hour return — decent but not spectacular. However, most of these are one-time costs. Year 2 and beyond, the savings are pure profit with near-zero maintenance.

Infrastructure consolidation is the hidden multiplier. A single $10/month VPS can run Chatwoot, Framadate, Uptime Kuma, Outline, and Dokku simultaneously. We optimized our VPS usage by bundling services. Total additional infrastructure cost: ~$1,900/year for everything. Before, we were paying that much for Dynatrace alone.

The best replacement is the one your team doesn't notice. Our smoothest migrations were Bitwarden (nobody noticed the change from Dashlane), Matomo (analytics worked identically), and Outline (the team actually preferred it over Confluence). The bumpiest: JetBrains → VS Code (some devs still miss IntelliJ) and Azure → Dokku (loss of managed scaling).

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How to audit your own SaaS stack

You don't need to replace 40 tools. You need a process to find the 10 that matter most. Here's the exact process we used:

Step 1: Discovery (1 hour)

Export your last 3 months of bank transactions (or use a tool like Bill.com or Expensify). Filter for recurring SaaS charges. Categorize them by function: communication, development, design, marketing, infrastructure, security, productivity. List every tool with its monthly and annual cost.

Most teams find 30-60 SaaS subscriptions. We had 47.

Step 2: Usage audit (2 hours per person)

Ask each team member to mark each tool as:

• Essential (used daily)
• Regular (used weekly)
• Occasional (used monthly)
• Unused (haven't opened in 90 days)

You'll be shocked at how many "unused" subscriptions exist. We found 12.

Step 3: Alternative search (4 hours per category)

For each tool that's "Regular" or "Occasional", search for open source alternatives. Our methodology:

1. Search "open source alternative to [Tool]" + "self-hosted"
2. Check GitHub stars, last commit date, and open issues count
3. Deploy the top 2 candidates on a test VPS
4. Run a 2-week trial with 2 volunteer team members
5. If trial passes, schedule migration in a low-traffic window

Step 4: Migration plan (2 hours)

For each approved replacement, document:

• Data export procedure (CSV, API, manual)
• Migration order (do this first, then this)
• Rollback plan (keep old tool running for 30 days)
• Team communication (what changes, what stays the same)

Step 5: Execute and validate (2-8 hours per replacement)

Execute migrations during low-traffic periods. Keep the old tool active in read-only mode for at least 30 days. Validate: does the alternative handle the same load? Are all integrations working? Did the team adapt?

Step 6: Monitor and optimize (30 min/month)

Track your SaaS spending monthly. We use a simple spreadsheet and a monthly reminder. When a new SaaS subscription appears, run through steps 2-3 before committing.

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FAQ

How long did the migration take overall?

We spent 6 months total — one category per month. Individual migrations ranged from 30 minutes (Framadate for Doodle) to 8 hours (DigitalOcean → Hetzner). Total team time invested: ~140 hours spread across 5 people.

What's the first tool I should replace?

If you're paying for any password manager (Dashlane, NordPass, 1Password), switch to Bitwarden. It's the simplest, fastest migration (15 minutes), zero disruption, and saves $300-600/year. Then: replace Postman with Bruno, and downgrade your monitoring tool to the free tier.

Are these replacements stable for production use?

Yes, with caveats. We've been running all 40 replacements for 6+ months. The most stable: Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Penpot, Dokku, PostHog, Meilisearch. The ones that required the most babysitting: Element/Matrix (bridges can be flaky), Mautic (email deliverability tuning). We treat open source tools like production infrastructure — they need monitoring, backups, and occasional updates. The total maintenance overhead is about 2-3 hours per month.

Did you keep any paid tools?

Yes. We kept:

• Claude API (best code generation quality for complex tasks)
• Hetzner (best price/performance for production servers)
• AWS Route53 (as DNS failover, $6/year)
• GitHub (the free tier covers everything we need)
• Vercel (free tier for one client-facing app)

Total kept: ~$1,200/year. We intentionally kept tools where the paid version was genuinely better than free alternatives.

What if a self-hosted service breaks at 2 AM?

We set up Grafana alerting → ntfy notifications on our phones. Most services restart automatically via Docker's restart policy or systemd. In 6 months, we've had 3 after-hours incidents: an SSL certificate expiration (fixed in 3 minutes via certbot cron), a disk-full alert on the logs VPS (cleared logs, 5 minutes), and a Matrix bridge crash (restarted via SSH, 2 minutes). Our old setup with paid SaaS also had outages (Slack was down for 4 hours in April 2026, nothing we could do).

How do you handle security and updates?

All self-hosted tools run in Docker containers with automatic updates via Watchtower. We use Fail2ban on every VPS, Cloudflare WAF in front of public services, and Bitwarden for credential management. Secrets are stored in environment files loaded at container start (not committed to Git). We run a weekly docker-compose pull && docker-compose up -d to keep everything patched. Total security maintenance: ~1 hour/month.

Will you update this list?

Yes. SaaS pricing changes, new open source projects launch, and some tools we replaced may become obsolete. We plan to review and update this list every 6 months. Next revision: January 2027. If you have a tool swap suggestion, open a GitHub issue.

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Conclusion

The SaaS subscription economy works on inertia. Once a tool is integrated into your workflow, it takes active effort to question it. Most teams don't. We didn't for years.

This audit taught us that the open source ecosystem in 2026 is no longer a compromise. Penpot rivals Figma. PostHog exceeds Mixpanel for self-hosted analytics. Outline is better than Confluence. Meilisearch outperforms Algolia for most search use cases.

The $4,200/year we saved is real. But the bigger win is the mindset shift: we now evaluate every tool subscription with a simple question: "Is this worth 10× what the open source alternative costs?" For most SaaS, the answer is no.

Start your audit this week. Export your bank statements, list your subscriptions, pick 3 easy replacements (password manager, API testing tool, monitoring dashboard), and execute them. In 30 days, you'll have saved hundreds of dollars with near-zero effort. In 6 months, you might be where we are.